How Easter 2024 unfolded in England

Privately, many Christians in England celebrated Easter with much joyful reverence.

Publicly, the media covered the greatest feast day in the Church year quite differently. It’s not the media’s fault. They covered only what they saw.

What follows are news items from the last ten days of March 2024.

Ramadan at King’s Cross railway station

On Tuesday, March 19, the display at King’s Cross showed that day’s hadith for Ramadan devotions on the railway station’s departure board:

The Telegraph reported (emphases mine):

A Network Rail spokesman said the publicly owned infrastructure company was marking the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which stretches from March 10 to April 9 in 2024.

“King’s Cross station is made up of a diverse and multicultural workforce and at times of religious significance, messages such as these are displayed to celebrate the station’s diversity and inclusivity,” they said …

“Throughout the year, messaging at the station also celebrates festivals from other religions including Easter, Christmas, Passover and Diwali to mark the beliefs of our colleagues and passengers.”

When asked by The Telegraph for examples of departure board messages displayed to mark other religious festivals, the spokesman suggested none were available because staff had taken no pictures of them.

Incredible.

Pakistani flag flies over Westminster Abbey

Did we know that the Pakistani flag flies over Westminster Abbey once a year?

It seemed to be the first time the British public had seen a photo of it, which circulated online on March 22. I believed it only when I saw it on GB News.

Pakistan’s The News reported that this takes place annually as the nation is part of the Commonwealth (bold in the original):

LONDON: Pakistan Day Special Memorial Service was held at the Westminster Abbey. In keeping with the past practice, Pakistani flag was also flown on top of the north tower of the Abbey.

As per details, [the] Abbey organized a special Evensong in connection with the National Day of Pakistan. Special prayers were offered for the strengthening of Pakistan-UK friendship and the well-being of the people of the two countries. While the national flag kept flying on top of the north tower of Westminster Abbey the entire day …

Pakistan Day commemorates the passing of Lahore Resolution, under which a separate nation for the Muslims of the British Indian empire demanded by Muslim League was passed on March 23, 1940.

Westminster Abbey has strong links to the Commonwealth and prays for the countries of the Commonwealth throughout its regular pattern of daily services.

Each year, the high commissioners of the Commonwealth countries are invited by the Dean to evensong on or close to their national day. The National Flag is flown on the day when the High Commission is represented at Evensong.

The Cross offends

It has become clear that the Cross offends our betters in Britain.

Radio Times

When I first moved here decades ago, I was heartened to see that the Radio Times, the original and foremost of broadcasting listing magazines, had illustrations of crosses in the margins of their pages for Good Friday and churches on Easter Day.

Unfortunately, the crosses and churches, except for tiny ones, disappeared some years ago. The veteran Christian commentator Catherine Pepinster observed in the Telegraph on Wednesday, March 20, ‘British officialdom treats Christianity with open contempt’:

Christian symbols and spaces are contested, too. Years ago, the Radio Times would have a special border on its pages with programmes for Good Friday, with a cross within the image. This year, the cross – the very thing that denotes Jesus’ crucifixion which is commemorated every Good Friday – is missing and instead there is a gambolling spring lamb and a miniscule church. Perhaps they thought it too distressing or too, well, overtly Christian.

However, that all went by the wayside long before 2024.

Pepinster notes that Good Friday is now viewed as a day of celebration rather than penitence:

… some restaurants have emailed me with an invitation to “celebrate” Good Friday with a slap-up lunch.

Hot cross buns

On March 21, GB News reported that Iceland, one of our supermarket chains, decided to replace the cross on hot cross buns with a tick (checkmark):

Iceland is running a trial where it will sell hot cross buns with a ‘tick’ instead of a ‘cross’ alongside the traditional treats that feature a cross.

However, this has caused fury among some customers and Christian groups as it removes the religious symbol, with some shoppers calling it “craziness” …

Research by Iceland suggested a fifth of customers want to ditch the cross and would prefer a ‘tick’ symbol on their sweet treats instead …

Iceland has made the change as part of a trial to find out which customers prefer and said it hopes to gauge feedback before rolling out further changes.

I can only hope that the traditional hot cross buns outsold those with the tick.

This year saw another hot cross bun change: the extravagant flavour varieties. Traditionally, the hot cross bun is a modest, lightly sweetened roll flavoured with spices to remind us of our Lord’s suffering on Good Friday. The cross on top is not sweet, either; it’s made out of edible paste. Now there are several gourmet varieties of hot cross bun: chocolate, bacon, cheese — you name it. It’s just wrong.

St George’s Cross on football shirts

On March 22, news emerged that the Football Association (soccer) modified the George Cross on the England team’s shirt collars, adding blue to the red.

This did not go down well, either.

The Guardian said:

Perhaps with a little foresight the Football Association could have avoided the unhappiness over the recoloured George Cross on its latest overpriced scratchy nylon replica shirt by suggesting this design detail was related to the fact England v Brazil takes place on the weekend of Palm Sunday, when the cross is traditionally hung with purple, thereby out-sanctifying even the most patriotic of brocade-fondlers.

Not that this would have helped anyone get any closer to the objective truth here. Which is that the flag (and this isn’t The Flag. It’s a flag) is not a protected symbol. Nike’s decision to go with a purple, blue and pink version of the beloved cross may be pointless, gimmicky, and even quite cynical – nobody here does anything without focus-grouping every last chevron and flash: if the response really was unforeseen then the FA and Nike need to sack their entire marketing teams.

I wonder how the shirts will sell.

I am amazed at how offensive decision-makers in any sector of our society find the George Cross when there are several other countries which have it as part of their national flag. Those nations never find it embarrassing or shameful. Why should the English?

Ramadan lights in London

A week after the aforementioned King’s Cross station departure board display, Ramadan lights went up once again in central London. I saw them last year.

They say ‘Happy Ramadan’, yet I thought that Ramadan was supposed to be a time of fasting, prayer and reflection before Eid.

No one says ‘Happy Lent’, do they?

On March 27, Wednesday of Holy Week, The Telegraph reported:

Ramadan lights will be on display in London’s West End over the Easter Weekend …

This year marks the second year that the Muslim celebration has been marked with illuminations in central London.

The lights are funded by the Aziz Foundation, a charity founded by Asif Aziz, a billionaire property developer whose company owns sites including the London Trocadero that occupies much of the block between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square.

The lights – wishing a ‘‘Happy Ramadan’’ – have drawn plaudits but prompted a warning from prominent local Conservatives that the council must also support the other major faiths during important festivals.

Last week Network Rail was forced to remove an Islamic message on the departure board at London King’s Cross.

The rail operator faced criticism following its decision to display a “hadith [Islamic epithet] of the day” to celebrate Ramadan, as part of a diversity initiative.

Among the criticisms Humanists UK said it felt public train stations “should not be urging ‘sinners’ to repent”, after the phrase was used in the message.

Paul Swaddle, leader of the minority Tory group on Westminster council, offered full support to the Ramadan lights but questioned why a Ramadan display in the window of Westminster’s city hall offices had not yet been replaced by an Easter one in time for this weekend.

Mr Swaddle said: “The thing I would question is this: there has been a Ramadan celebration in the window of Westminster city hall. But I just wonder if the Easter one is going up very soon? Easter is one of the most important Christian festivals of the year but what are they [the Labour council] doing to celebrate it? I am not aware they are. I suspect the window display is not going to change.”

Not a chance.

Maundy Thursday

For whatever reason, HMP (His Majesty’s Prison) Lewes decided to serve curry to the inmates on Maundy Thursday. The curry made them ill:

Hmm.

BBC drops televised Easter Day broadcast

On Good Friday, the Telegraph informed us that there would be no televised BBC broadcast of an Easter church service this year:

The BBC has been accused of turning its back on Britain’s Christian faith after scrapping its broadcast of the traditional Easter service from King’s College, Cambridge.

The programme has been dropped in favour of religious coverage elsewhere across the corporation’s platforms.

It comes after the BBC decided to invite “confirmed atheist” and humanist campaigner Alice Roberts on the Good Friday edition of Desert Island Discs [BBC Radio 4] rather than a Christian figure …

Critics have said the BBC appeared to be deliberately abandoning the part of its audience that professed the Christian faith.

Andrea Williams, the chief executive of Christian Concern, said: “The BBC’s motto, ‘Nation shall speak peace unto nation’, is Biblical in origin. The more the BBC seeks to forget and minimise the primary role of the Christian faith shaping this nation, the darker all things will become. Easter reminds us of Christ’s victory over death, which is a good-news message for us all.”

But the BBC has rejected claims that it is ignoring the role of Christianity and religion in general after dropping the King’s College Easter service, which was shown on BBC Two last year and had been on television since 2010.

Sad.

Church of England unhelpful

One cannot say that the Church of England has helped to bring the meaning of Lent, Holy Week and Easter to the English consciousness.

On Palm Sunday, the Telegraph reported that a female Church of England cleric, the Ven Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, Archdeacon of Liverpool, wants to ‘smash the patriarchy’ and promote ‘anti-whiteness’:

Dr Threlfall-Holmes wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “I went to a conference on whiteness last autumn. It was very good, very interesting and made me realise: whiteness is to race as patriarchy is to gender.

“So yes, let’s have anti-whiteness, and let’s smash the patriarchy. That’s not anti-white, or anti-men, it’s anti-oppression.”

In response, users of X suggested that if the Cambridge-educated priest wanted “anti-whiteness” then she should “lead by example and resign”.

We all know about the recent questions that ‘conversions’ have raised with regard to those who would like asylum status.

Even more of us know how disappointing the recent Archbishops of Canterbury have been, particularly the present incumbent, Justin Welby.

Just because Easter was on March 31 this year, the earliest in some time, Welby has hoped since 2016 that Easter in the UK would be on a fixed day every year, putting us at odds with the rest of the Christian world outside of the Orthodox churches.

On Good Friday, The Times told us about a law that gained Royal Assent which would do that very thing: ‘How a 96-year-old law could stop Easter hopping around the calendar’.

Oddly enough, the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, promoted the idea:

The Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, Randall Davidson, supported it and a private member’s bill was introduced by John Simon, the former home secretary and future chancellor. The bill was passed, but all it did was create a mechanism by which the date could be fixed — and that mechanism has still not been triggered.

The 1928 Easter Act:

has lain dormant since the moment it was given royal assent as the conditions for its use have never been satisfied — but a movement could be building to change that.

Welby thinks it’s a great idea:

In recent years the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, has expressed support for the idea and Anglican leaders discussed the matter with Catholic and Orthodox Christians. Should there be agreement, the Easter Act 1928 could be triggered and Easter Sunday would have a permanent slot …

… In 2016, Welby said he was talking to other Christian leaders about fixing the date of Easter, adding: “I would expect it to be within five to ten years’ time, as most people have probably printed their calendars for the next five years and school holidays and so on are already fixed and it affects almost everything you do in the spring and summer. I would love to see it before I retire.”

Not surprisingly, secularists support the idea. Planning around the greatest Christian feast day is just too inconvenient:

“It’s ridiculous that almost a century after legislation was passed to fix the date for Easter, businesses, schools and families are still inconvenienced by Easter moving around the calendar,” said a spokesman for the National Secular Society. “Instead of waiting indefinitely for the elusive consensus from church leaders, the government should press on and fix the date so the rest of us can benefit from the certainty of a fixed spring break.”

In 2021, the Conservative government said it has no plans to bring forward a statutory instrument (SI) to make this happen:

Paul Scully, then the small business minister, told the National Secular Society that he appreciated their case but that there was as yet no intention to trigger the Easter Act until Christians gave their assent.

That would have to be all Christian communities, not just the CofE:

… it would never happen without clear assent from the Christian communities.

Let’s hope it stays that way.

Easter Day

Meanwhile, there are vicars up and down the country who are doing their best to preach the Gospel and manage local church finances rather than focus on identity politics. One of them is the Revd Greg Smith, a husband to wife Fran, father of four and grandfather to three youngsters. The Revd and Mrs Smith live in Shropshire.

On Easter Day, the Telegraph related his story in ‘How Britain lost faith in the Church of England’:

On Sunday, the Reverend Greg Smith, rector of St George’s in the small south Shropshire market town of Pontesbury, will be leading services in three of the six far-flung churches that make up the benefice – or extended parish – that he heads.

Two other clergy will assist him with the rest, one of them St Luke’s, Snailbeach, now designated a “festival church”, meaning usage is so low it is only open on holy and high days.

“I’ve got a 6.30am, a nine o’clock and a 10.30am,” says Smith. “That is going to be a lot of running around in the car, rushing out of one church and into the next, never spending time with people, not able to prepare properly” …

The impression created that the rural ministry of the Church of England is on its knees is not one accepted by Greg Smith, who in whatever spare time he has when not driving around in his car between churches, running a food bank, two community cafes for young people and a bereavement service, is compiling a report on the subject for his local bishop … 

The life he leads is, he agrees, relentless. There are currently 72 clergy in the diocese of Hereford in which Pontesbury sits, shouldering the burden of parish work in 406 churches, with nine vacancies, so it is doing better than Truro [the thinly-stretched diocese in Cornwall]. But three quarters of those priests in the diocese licenced to officiate at services are over 50 years of age.

And the workload on them isn’t made any easier when 90 per cent of the churches in the diocese are listed buildings. “It’s a challenge to care for one listed building, but I’ve got five and all have big bills round the corner,” reports Smith.

In St George’s, there is one pending for £250,000 for repairs to the stained glass at the east end of the church. Holy Trinity in Minsterley, the next village along, needs a similar sum.

“There are some grants available, but it’s a lot of paperwork that never stops.”

In the past, some of that form filling would have fallen to the church wardens, volunteers from the congregation, often with professional expertise. Yet a report earlier this month revealed that a quarter of all CofE parishes no longer have even a single church warden.

England’s Anglican churches need money to survive, yet:

A high-profile panel has urged an increase from £100 million to £1 billion in the fund already earmarked by the Church Commissioners to atone for Anglicanism’s historical involvement in the slave trade.

If the recommendation of the panel, whose chairman is Bishop Rosemarie Mallett of Croydon, is accepted, the cost would substantially reduce the Commissioners’ ability to give local churches the boost they are crying out for right now to keep things going.

As history tells us, the Church of England was prominent in the abolition of the slave trade in the 19th century, but let’s not allow facts to get in the way of identity politics.

Justin Welby’s acquiescence to close churches during the pandemic did not help, either.

Smith himself says of CofE wokery:

I’m not saying these things are not important but what I can say is that these are not conversations I am having locally. The only people who have spoken to me about reparations for slavery are other clergy.

People are much more exercised about keeping the [church] building warm and getting children, the younger generation, in to worship with us. The national church can feel a million miles away.

Another vicar has had the same experience, albeit in south London:

Like Greg Smith in Shropshire, the Reverend Ruth Burge-Thomas, vicar at Holy Spirit Church in Clapham since 2012, experiences the daily struggle to make the Church relevant to her local community in 2024.

A local girl whose mother grew up on one of the council estates in the parish, she argues that as vicar, “you are owned by the community. Whenever I go out, a five-minute walk often takes me 45 minutes because so many people stop me to talk about what is troubling them.”

I wish both vicars — and others like them — abundant blessings in their respective ministries.

On a church-related note, one happy event was King Charles’s walkabout outside of Windsor Castle on Easter morning. The Telegraph told us:

The King has re-emerged into public life for the first time since his diagnosis with cancer, in a walkabout with 56 handshakes, a homemade card, and a promise that he is “doing his best”.

He was “very touched” to see people there for him, he said, smiling broadly and thanking members of the public as their hopes that he “get well soon”, “keep going strong” and “never give in” rolled in.

At Windsor Castle, after the Easter Matins service which was his first public appearance since Christmas Day, the King was in his element after his doctors agreed he could resume the walkabouts he loves.

His mother would have been pleased, to say the least.

Well, while England’s Easter in 2024 might not have been the brightest and best in living memory, the remnant of believers holds fast to that which is good: the Gospel message — and the Resurrection.

What’s on Anglican priests’ minds: Church of England attendance rates in ‘doom spiral’

Well, well, well.

Who would have been surprised to discover that Church of England rates are still on the decline post-pandemic? Remember how the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, was so quick to shut churches during lockdown back in the Spring of 2020?

Here is the man himself, all masked up during those fateful days:

I will get to the statistics in a second, but they brought quite a reaction from the Revd Marcus Walker, Rector at St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London, who is also the chairman of the Anglican campaign group, Save the Parish.

He had this to say:

As sure as night follows day if you close parishes and reduce clergy, the number of people who are able to turn up to church will fall.

This is a doom spiral of the church’s own choosing. It has the money to turn this around, the question is: does it have the will?

The Telegraph published the quote as well as the statistics on Saturday, February 17, 2024, ‘Clergy warn of “doom spiral” as church attendance drops off at record rate’ (emphases mine below):

Sunday church attendance is just 80 per cent of what it was in 2019, Telegraph analysis has revealed, despite the Church of England claiming that it has “bounced back” after the pandemic …‌

‌In 2023, The Telegraph published an investigation which revealed that parishes are closing at a record rate, prompting fears that the Church had been “dealt a death knell”.

‌The investigation found that almost 300 parishes have disappeared in the past five years alone – the fastest rate since records began in 1960. 

The figures came against the backdrop of claims that senior bishops and clergy were “putting a gun to people’s heads” to drive through controversial plans to cut costs, merge parishes and cut vicars.

They also came amid declining congregation numbers, leaving many clergy afraid to speak out for fear of losing their jobs.

The Telegraph has analysed new data from the Church of England’s latest Statistics for Mission 2022 report, and has found that across the country, usual Sunday church attendance sits at 81 per cent of 2019 levels, meaning that 133,200 regular parishioners had not returned to the Church despite the end of Covid restrictions.

The Telegraph said that the CofE criticised the paper’s previous reporting, but the reporters stand by the numbers:

The Telegraph’s previous reporting on the fall in regular parishioners in 2021 had been described as “misleading” by the Church, as some Covid restrictions were still in place at the time the 2021 report was compiled.

‌However, the latest figures suggest that this is not the case.‌

Furthermore, the data show that a further 28 parishes were closed or merged in the past year, which has been controversial among churchgoers.

This, however, is below the record-breaking rate of reductions seen in the preceding five years when an average of 56 parishes ceased a year.

‌Across the country, 41 churches were closed, meaning 641 churches have been closed since 2000 or 4 per cent.

Despite some recovery in post-pandemic attendance, overall, the big picture does not look good:

… year on year, average attendance has increased by seven per cent.

‌This means that since 1987, usual Sunday church attendance has more than halved (-52.8 per cent), declining from 1.2 million to 556,800.‌

The peaks and troughs vary across England:

In Durham, just three-quarters (73 per cent) of usual congregants have returned, whilst in St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, it is 89 per cent, the highest in the country …‌

‌Furthermore, over the past six years, usual Sunday church attendees have declined at a record rate with an average 32,616 fewer attendees per year.‌

The CofE put its own spin on the figures:

According to the Church of England’s most recent data, contained in its Statistics for Mission, it claimed that nearly a million people were regular worshippers in 2023 as the Church “continued its post-pandemic bounce back” …

Responding to The Telegraph’s latest analysis, a Church spokesman said: “The Church of England’s 2022 Statistics for Mission – the latest available – showed a welcome rise in attendance for the second year in a row with nearly a million regular worshippers in Church of England churches …

“There is unprecedented investment in mission and ministry taking place in the Church of England of £3.6 billion up to 2031.”

However, that ‘unprecedented investment in mission and ministry’ does not mean that Anglican churches are likely to stay open. The reality, as those involved with Save the Parish will testify, actually means that many are vulnerable to closure. As it is, clergy in some parts of England, particularly Cornwall, are spread thinly on the ground over large benefices.

The Revd Mr Walker is right: the Church has the money, but does it have the will? That is the question.

What’s on Anglican priests’ minds: Church admits some migrant conversions could be bogus

February 2024’s newspapers and current affairs programmes featured quite a few articles and segments on English churches making a concerted effort to convert willing migrants in search of asylum.

Although the Church of England is top dog in that department, the Baptists are at it, too.

Chemical attacker a ‘Baptist’

On Tuesday, February 6, Britons were shocked to discover that the Newcastle man suspected of being responsible for the horrific and heartless chemical attack on a mother and two daughters in Clapham, South London, had become a Baptist beforehand. Neighbours and police also suffered chemical burns of varying degrees. The mother, still in hospital, is too unwell to speak with police.

It is thought that the man became acquainted with the woman online. She is also thought to be from a non-EU country.

The Telegraph carried the story, ‘Clapham attack suspect Abdul Ezedi “converted to Christianity” with Baptist Church’ (emphases mine):

The suspect in the Clapham chemical attack converted to Christianity with a Baptist church which “welcomes strangers”, The Telegraph understands.

Abdul Ezedi has been on the run for six days after allegedly dousing a 31-year-old woman and her two daughters, aged three and eight, with an alkaline substance and trying to run them over with a car before fleeing the scene in Clapham, south London.

Ezedi was convicted of sex offences in 2018 in Newcastle but was allowed to remain in the country because the sentence was not severe enough to reach the threshold for deportation.

It has emerged that Ezedi, 35, was twice refused asylum before being granted leave to remain in the UK after a priest vouched for his conversion, arguing that he was “wholly committed” to his new religion.

The Church of England and the Catholic Church in England and Wales both vehemently denied that Ezedi was converted to the faith via their denominations.

However, a spokesperson for Baptists Together, a movement of more than 1,800 local churches supported by regional associations, colleges, and national specialist teams, has now spoken out saying that it will “always adopt a posture of welcome and compassion to those fleeing war”.

Asked whether Ezedi was specifically converted via the Baptist denomination, a spokesperson declined to answer any further questions specifically referring to Ezedi “as it’s an ongoing police investigation”.

Their statement comes after the Daily Mail quoted a government source as saying that a reference from a Baptist chapel in the North East, where Ezedi was living, was crucial in persuading an immigration tribunal that he had converted from Islam to Christianity. This statement led to him being allowed to stay in Britain on the grounds of human rights.

The source said: “The one that really made a difference was from the Baptist church. One personal written submission talked of knowing Ezedi for four years, he had been attending church and they thought he was a genuine convert.”

It remains unknown which Baptist chapel helped Ezedi convert to Christianity. The Telegraph has contacted every Baptist church in Newcastle and every suburb that Ezedi was associated with, asking if they knew him and they either said that they did not, or did not respond.

The comment from Baptists Together comes after an evangelical church leader spoke out on Monday saying that priests must look for “red flags” when baptising asylum seekers because some are faking conversion …

In their statement in response to questions about Ezedi’s conversion, Baptists Together said: “We are fully aware of the questions being asked of our churches surrounding Abdul Shokoor Ezedi and broader queries around supporting asylum seekers.

“One of the most consistent and explicit teachings in the Bible is to ‘welcome the stranger’. In recognition of this, Baptist churches around the UK and across the world have always, and will always, adopt a posture of welcome and compassion to those fleeing war, persecution, famine and the consequences of climate change, irrespective of any intention to convert to Christianity.

“Listening to their stories, their experiences and their needs is a fundamental aspect of this welcome and, on occasion, as relationships develop between churches and refugees and asylum seekers, enquiries will be made to churches about issues of faith and belief.”

The statement was quite long; the article has the rest of it.

A pastor who is not a Baptist and who has taken part in migrant conversions sounded a bit of an alarm bell. I say ‘a bit’, because I have seen him on television news programmes, and he still seems committed to the project, by and large:

Pastor Graham Nicholls, the Director of Affinity, a network of 1,200 evangelical churches and ministries in the UK, said that church leaders “need discernment” to “test whether people are genuine in their beliefs”, adding that in some cases, some prospective converts are “faking it”.

He said “red flags” may consist of large numbers of people presenting as converts, an undue haste from people to receive some credible sign of being a Christian like baptism, a “rather mechanical assent to believing but without any obvious heart change”, and a general sense they might not be genuine.

He acknowledged that “these things are hard to judge” and that “we cannot see into people’s souls”, but added: “There seems to be a problem of asylum seekers claiming to have been converted to Christianity to support their applications.”

On February 9, it emerged that a Baptist minister was working with migrants being housed on the Bibby Stockholm barge, which once was used for oil industry workers. It is now docked at Portland on the south coast.

The Mail reported:

Dave Rees, an elder at Weymouth Baptist Church, defended its decision to carry out a mass conversion of residents of the Bibby Stockholm – with six already baptised and a further 36 to follow.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4 on Sunday, he said his church had a Farsi-speaking minister who knew the asylum seekers’ language and cultural practices.

‘Because we had this link we felt confident that the measures we put in place and the scrutiny we have, there’s no reason we would doubt these asylum seekers,’ Mr Rees said.

He said some of the men claimed they had been Christians in their home countries, while others had completed a 11-week Alpha [Anglican] course, which seeks to introduce possible converts to the basics of the Christian faith. 

‘Obviously, we need to make sure that they believe in Jesus, they believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, they repent of their sins and also they want to start a new life in the church,’ he said.

‘And they have to give a public testimony at their baptism, which they did in a native language and was translated into English.’

On Wednesday, February 7, Conservative MP Tim Loughton raised a question about this to Rishi Sunak at Prime Minister’s Questions:

MPs have raised concerns that migrants from majority Muslim countries are converting to Christianity in order to claim they are at risk of persecution in their home nations due to their religious beliefs. 

Sussex MP Tim Loughton raised the issue in Parliament on Wednesday, asking Prime Minister Rishi Sunak: ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury has admitted that since taking office, the attendance at the Church of England has dropped by 15% and in the 10 years to Covid, the number of baptisms in the Church of England has fallen from 140,000-a-year to 87,000.

‘So Christianity in the UK seems to be on the wane unless apparently, you are from a Muslim country in the middle of an asylum claim. We’re now told one in seven occupants of the Bibby Stockholm have suddenly become practising Christians.

‘Can I ask the Prime Minister that given that the Church of England has now issued secret guidance for clergy supporting asylum applications for these Damascene conversions, who is the church accountable to and are taxpayers being scammed by the Archbishop?’

Mr Sunak replied that Mr Cleverly [Home Secretary James Cleverly] had requested more information on migrants converting to Christianity.

So far, this is what we know:

The Home Office has admitted it has no idea how many asylum seekers have been allowed to stay in the UK after converting to Christianity, as the hunt for Ezedi continues.

It is believed that Afghan sex offender Ezedi persuaded churches to support his claim, and was even given a written testimonial by a Baptist minister as well as additional backing from the Catholic church, sources told the Mail.

The findings of Mr Cleverly’s investigation are set to form part of an internal review that he commissioned following the attack in south London last week.

Home Office sources said that officials in the department have struggled to find data relating to how many asylum seekers have cited their apparent conversion to Christianity.

A source previously told the Mail that a reference from a Baptist chapel in the North East, where Ezedi was living, was crucial in persuading an immigration tribunal that he had converted from Islam to Christianity. This led to him being allowed to stay in Britain on the grounds of human rights.

‘The one that really made a difference was from the Baptist church,’ a government source said. ‘One personal written submission talked of knowing Ezedi for four years, he had been attending church and they thought he was a genuine convert.’

Further backing was provided by the Catholic Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, the source claimed.

The Home Office has said caseworkers are trained to only grant protection to those in genuine need by assessing claims ‘in the round’ and not taking priests’ testimony as ‘determinative’. 

Archbishop of Canterbury strikes back

The Mail article says that the Archbishop of Canterbury issued a statement following Loughton’s question in Parliament:

Following Prime Minister’s Questions, the Archbishop of Canterbury issued a statement hitting out at the ‘mischaracterisation of the role of churches and faith groups in the asylum system’.

‘It is the job of the government to protect our borders and of the courts to judge asylum cases,’ he said. 

‘The church is called to love, mercy and do justice. 

‘I encourage everyone to avoid irresponsible and inaccurate comments – and let us not forget that at the heart of this conversation are vulnerable people whose lives are precious in the sight of God.’

The Church of England has recently come under fire for allegedly ‘facilitating industrial-scale bogus asylum claims‘, with former Home Secretaries Suella Braverman and Dame Priti Patel accusing church leaders of ‘political activism’. 

Regardless of what the Archbishop of Canterbury says, this is what many Britons are thinking:

Former Anglican vicar tells his story

On Thursday, February 8, The Telegraph‘s Allison Pearson posted a column on a former Anglican vicar who got in touch with her about his experience in Darlington, in the north of England, ‘”I refuse to be complicit in baptism dishonesty” says Free Church of England vicar’.

Firth, 41, left the Church of England in 2020 and now serves as a vicar for the Free Church of England, established in the 19th century.

It should be noted that the Free Church of England is separate from the Church of England. The Free Church of England is part of GAFCON (Global Anglican Future Conference), a group of Anglican churches that have broken away from Canterbury’s spiritual leadership.

The article has a photo of the Revd Matthew Firth wearing a dog collar and a rugby jersey. He seems affable.

He told Pearson his story about the time when he was still a Church of England priest in the Diocese of Durham:

In 2018, when the Reverend Matthew Firth took up his new post at St Cuthbert’s, the church which has been at the heart of the north-eastern market town of Darlington since the 12th century, he was eager to bring new souls to the faith he passionately believes in.

It didn’t take long, however, for Matthew to figure out that there was something suspicious about the large number of souls from the Middle East who were queuing up to be converted to Christianity.

“When I arrived, lots of adult baptisms were already booked in, which was highly unusual. The vast majority, if not all of them, were asylum seekers who had already failed in their initial application for asylum. Clearly, if you were rejected, the next step was to book in for baptism,” Matthew told me on Thursday on the phone from his home in York.

All of the candidates for baptism at St Cuthbert’s were men, mainly from Iran and Syria. The new vicar decided to allow some of the services to go ahead – “I felt I had to honour them, I wasn’t going to just cancel” – but, when they took place, he says the baptisms felt like a kind of performance.

The photographs taken afterwards confirmed his suspicions:

“I got the distinct impression that people were trying to put on a sense of emotion that their baptism had happened. So, when the photos are taken, it looks as though they’re absolutely overwhelmed with emotion. To create a situation where it looks as though this is totally above board and genuine.”

Usually, the relatives of the newly baptised take a few discreet photos. A vast number of pictures were taken at the baptisms of the asylum seekers. To the astonished reverend, it looked like a professional job. “All of a sudden, literally, a couple of hours later, you’d spot on Facebook that all of their Facebook banner pictures and profile pictures have been changed to the baptism photos. All of them, just flooded with baptism photos.

“And, again, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that this is to present a case. It’s to say, ‘Look at my Facebook profile! It’s full of Christian stuff. I’m a genuine Christian.’ But this was literally overhauling a Facebook profile to create a new brand [for themselves].”

The Cambridge astrophysics graduate discovered more while in post at St Cuthbert’s. According to him baptisms were turning into a racket there:

… he had stumbled upon “a conveyor belt, a veritable industry of asylum baptisms”. It was a blatant transaction.

As Matthew recalls, “There was one particular individual who was a Muslim who had gained permission to stay in England. He wasn’t seeking baptism himself, because he’d been granted asylum. And he was always around and he would bring cohorts of these people seeking asylum to the church. It would usually be after the service.

“So, I’d be at the back shaking hands with the regular congregation as they were leaving, and this Muslim guy would bring these people to me and he would immediately say, ‘These want baptism, these want baptism, these want baptism’.”

On occasions, Matthew claims he even saw money changing hands. “I observed things, you know, quietly slipping in the pocket, people slipping him money.”

Good grief. You mean actual physical cash? “Yeah, I saw that happening. Now, it’s obviously never as overt as, ‘Here you go, here’s the money, get me baptised.’ But you see people going away into corners and slipping money to the middleman who is bringing loads of them into the church.”

Then he discovered he was expected to give a written reference of sorts for these newly baptised migrants:

Once the asylum seekers had ticked baptism off their How to Win the Right to Stay in Britain list, approaches were made to Matthew to provide evidence for an immigration tribunal that their conversion to Christianity was genuine.

“I’d immediately get a letter. As soon as those baptisms happened, literally a couple of days later, I hear from their lawyer saying, ‘Right, can you tell me about this person’s faith and church involvement, their evangelistic work and what they do for the church’.”

The lawyers specialised in immigration law and Matthew got the impression that “a lot of it was on legal aid”. Was he under any pressure to provide a more convincing picture of these so-called Christian conversions?

“Yes, absolutely. So, when I sent emails to these lawyers saying all I can tell you is that such and such attends Sunday service, the reply came back, ‘Well, yes, but can you please say that our clients do evangelism? And please can you say that they help the adults around the church? Try to fill out a picture of them being really active Christians’.”

Matthew refused point blank. “Well, no, sorry, I’m not going to say that, because it’s not true. Or I don’t have any evidence of it.”

… he got the firm impression that immigration lawyers expect CofE vicars to be helpful and supportive to their clients …

The reverend put a brake on the asylum/baptism conveyor belt at St Cuthbert’s, although he never denied anyone the chance to be baptised. “What I did say is, ‘Well, great! Come to church for six months.’ And then they all just drifted away, because it’s not genuine.” He points out that a couple of the men who were granted asylum were never seen at church again.

He told Pearson that there were a few ‘progressive activists’ (his words) in his church who were working with refugees and objected to his approach:

He was subject to what he calls “low-level bullying” and interpersonal hostility.

Firth says that these frequent baptisms occur where asylum seekers are being lodged pending their claims’ outcome:

Actually, I’m aware of it going on in many parishes in England, I know of so many examples where it’s happening. It’s in the areas where the Government places people who are seeking asylum.

As for senior clergy, Firth said that whatever boosts baptism figures in a sluggish denomination pleases them:

It’s very encouraging for them to have lots of adult baptisms, he says, “Because it gives a sense that they’re being successful, that the faith or their ministry has been successful in winning converts”.

“It’s very good for their pride. And, of course, it is wonderful when you have lots of people who are adults who have come to faith. But, in their heart of hearts, I think they know that a lot of these people are not genuine.”

He cites Mohammad Eghtedarian, a former curate at Liverpool cathedral who fled Iran as a refugee and was a brave and genuine convert to Christianity. “He said to me that, in his experience at Liverpool cathedral, probably over half of the asylum seekers were not genuine in terms of their baptism requests.”

One of Liverpool cathedral’s asylum-seeker converts was Emad Al Swealmeen, who was taking a bomb in a taxi to a maternity hospital on Remembrance Sunday in 2021 when it detonated, killing him. Al Swealmeen had been refused asylum in 2014 and lost an appeal three years later before going through a Christianity course run for asylum seekers.

However, it was the Abdul Ezedi story that prompted Firth to contact Pearson:

That, and the disingenuous response from the Archbishop of Canterbury, which infuriates him. “I think the church is allowing itself to be used by people who do not have pure motives, in fact, people who have pretty terrible motives.

“It’s not a direct thing, but it’s a sense of naivety; turning a blind eye. Vicars are acting in a way that increases the likelihood of many people who don’t have strong claims actually getting over the line. And a certain proportion of those people will be here with a background of criminality. So while it’s not direct wrongdoing from the church, there is complicity, which is not right. You know, it’s simply not right.

“I’m not saying that all clergy that conduct these baptisms are doing that, but there is a significant element. And when Justin Welby says it’s not the church’s responsibility to judge asylum applications, that’s the Home Office, that’s not being truthful.”

Firth was also unhappy about Welby’s criticism of people who say the conversions should be conducted with more discernment:

It is insulting. There are a lot of Christians who are discerning and wise, and they can see what’s happening. And they are concerned about our culture and our society and the impact of huge, huge levels of illegal immigration on those things. They are rightly concerned about that.

And for Justin Welby to sort of tar them all with this brush of being unwelcoming and uncaring and so on is frankly unacceptable. He’s suggesting the clergy shouldn’t be discerning. Well, we should; we have to administer the baptism in a discerning way.

Pearson and Firth then discussed Church of England policies in general:

I mention a document called “Supporting Asylum Seekers – Guidance for Church of England Clergy”, which teaches vicars how to assist asylum seekers.

“Of course, again, they’ve been clever there. They’ll just say clergy are facing these situations and all we’re doing is producing a document to support those who asked us for advice. But there is an ideological support for the culture of mass immigration that we’re seeing.”

Matthew compares the situation with the Civil Service, where there is resistance to enacting Conservative policies like the Rwanda plan. “Actually, there’s an equivalent civil service at Church House, Westminster, which is producing all of this guidance.”

Firth then gave his views on asylum, excerpted below:

He speaks eloquently about the need to be hospitable to people who genuinely need asylum. “But I liken national hospitality to the home. You could welcome people into your home and show the sacrificial hospitality and that’s fine. But if the hospitality that you’re showing fundamentally undermines the functioning of the household, then actually we’re not called to that in the Church …

“So if people are receiving our national hospitality and then they commit crimes, or they go on huge marches or do something that undermines the values that our particular national home espouses, then the equivalent is somebody being welcomed into your private home and messing up the house. Or damaging our national home. And if that hospitality is being abused in various ways, then you have to look again and say, No, no, we can’t do this.”

As for the mass migration we are currently seeing, legal and illegal:

He adds: “Also, there’s a cultural aspect, when you have very large population movements in a short space of time which we have had since 1997, then that does undermine the culture of the host nation.”

Matthew asks me if that makes sense. It really does. In a bitter irony, the Church of England may hasten its own demise by carrying out hundreds, possibly thousands of fake baptisms of men who remain devout Muslims.

He laughs. “I don’t think the Church of England has really thought that through. The House of Bishops and the vast majority of clergy in the Church of England are aligned with Left-wing politics. And they are very comfortable with what we’re seeing in terms of the levels of immigration. And they would regard somebody like me as being Right-wing and unkind.

“But actually, all I’m doing is just not misusing a sacrament. And also choosing not to be complicit in dishonesty. And also choosing not to be undermining of culture that happens with mass immigration, you know, I think I care about the people who are already here, you know, as well as people who may be genuine asylum seekers” …

“I am going on the record here because there’s a national untruth being told,” he says. “The churches say, ‘There are no faults. No, we’re just trying to welcome people. Nothing to see here.’ Well, there is something to see here. And Justin Welby, I think he’s been untruthful in the way he’s presented things. ‘Our vicars are just getting on with being welcoming,’ he says.

“But, actually, the story is one of being used by bad men like Abdul Ezedi who hurt innocent people. The Church of England needs to be exposed for its shameful part in all this.”

That day, The Telegraph posted a rapid follow-up article, which Allison Pearson co-authored with Charles Hymas, ‘Church of England has become “conveyor belt for asylum seeker fake conversions”‘, in which the Diocese of Durham took exception to Firth’s criticisms. The diocese said he had not told them anything about his experience with regard to baptisms:

Mr Firth – a self-avowed traditional evangelical Christian – said the asylum seekers “drifted away” after he introduced the six month rule but alleged he was “cold shouldered” by the senior clergy, which culminated in his departure from his post and decision to join the Free Church of England …

A spokesman for the Diocese of Durham said: “We do not recognise the picture these allegations present and have not seen any evidence of such claims.

“Mr Firth no longer ministers in the Church of England, however at no point during his time in office did he raise any of these claims as a concern or an issue. Had he done so, we would have looked into the matter. We would query whether he has ever raised his concerns with the authorities.”

Regardless, I saw Allison Pearson on Patrick Christys Tonight (GB News) either that night or the next and she had nothing bad to say about the Revd Mr Firth.

On February 9, Telegraph readers had their say in ‘It’s not for the Church to act as immigration officials’, excerpted below, with each paragraph representing a different reader’s opinion:

It’s not called religious conversion, it’s called playing the system. You can’t blame them for trying. We can however blame the fools who are naive enough to let them.

Islam forbids Muslims from leaving their faith. Apostasy can mean a death sentence so it is very rare that they convert to another religion. This is just another ruse to remain in the country.

Surely churches have a duty of care to their own community which overrides specious asylum contrivances? Or so I would hope.

The Church should not be converting asylum seekers to Christianity until they are granted the right to stay here. This is all a scam promoted by immigration lawyers and asylum charities.

The reasoning behind the granting of asylum has been inverted and the safety of British citizens is of no account, it is only the welfare of fit, healthy, young men that pay £3,000 to cross illegally from a perfectly safe country that we should consider?

On Saturday, February 10, The Guardian had an article about the Diocese of Durham’s response to Firth’s comments in The Telegraph, ‘C of E refutes claims of “conveyor belt” of asylum seeker fake conversions’:

The Church of England has refuted a claim that it operated a “conveyor belt for asylum seeker fake conversions”, saying parish records disproved the eye-catching allegation …

Lee Anderson, the former Conservative party [deputy] chairman, said: “The Church of England is in my opinion encouraging people to lie about their faith in order to claim asylum.”

On Thursday, a former C of E priest claimed the church was complicit in a “conveyor belt and veritable industry of asylum baptisms”. Matthew Firth, who was a priest in the north of England, told the Telegraph that about 20 asylum seekers had sought baptisms at his church to support their applications, and he believed there were “probably” thousands of asylum baptisms in the C of E.

Paul Butler, the bishop of Durham, has said Firth’s claims were “imaginative” and “some distance from reality”.

In a statement, Butler said: “Mr Firth does not offer any evidence to support these claims, however a check of the parish records quickly reveals … a total of 15 people (13 adults, 2 infants) who may have been asylum seekers have been baptised over the past 10 years. Of these, seven were baptised by Mr Firth himself.

“As priest in charge, he will have been aware of his responsibility to check the authenticity of candidates. If there was any sign of anything amiss, Mr Firth should have reported this. Had he raised any concerns at any point with senior staff … they would of course have been taken seriously and investigated. He did not do so.”

I find the bishop’s baptism number from St Cuthbert’s interesting, unless Firth managed to stop the bogus baptisms quickly.

Misplaced concern: the wrong people are being accommodated

That day, the former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey — Lord Carey — sided with Britons in his opinion piece for The Telegraph, ‘The Church must not turn a blind eye to the impact of mass migration on Britain’:

… the Church of England’s opposition to the Rwanda legislation for example has disturbed me by its ferocity and intensity. The Rwanda plan has been denounced from pulpits up and down the land. And in my increasingly long memory, I have never known the Peers Spiritual – the 26 bishops who sit by right in the House of Lords – lay down such an array of detailed amendments.

My disagreement with the Archbishop and bishops in the House, therefore, is not with their compassion and Christian care for others, but their blindness to what migration is doing to our country – our culture, our infrastructure and our common life.

We have been here before and we have failed to do anything about it. In 2010, I joined Parliamentarians including former Speaker, the late Baroness Boothroyd, and the great Labour MP, Frank Field, in signing the Balanced Migration Group’s Declaration. This called on the major parties to make manifesto pledges to prevent the UK’s population reaching 70 million in under 20 years, as it was forecast to at the time.

How wrong we were. Not, as it turns out, in making the declaration, but in trusting official projections. According to the Office for National Statistics, we will reach that 70 million figure at least four years early. By mid-2036, we are now projected to grow to 73.7 million.

So my concern and attention is also for those affected by a severe lack of housing and services, a situation which is reaching breaking point in poorer areas. The elites are well-protected, but Britain’s poorest have a different experience. An experiment in mass immigration has been foisted upon them without their consent, changing their lives and their communities.

I’ve been surprised therefore by the thin-skinned nature of the church’s response in this latest controversy. When you raise your head above the parapet you must expect to be criticised. I know I will be over this article. But the Church hierarchy seems to be denying that there is a problem at all, or anything questionable about its own actions and statements.

One result of this is that churches stand accused of boosting the credentials of asylum seekers and gullibly accepting insincere conversions. This is not in fact so, because it is the Home Office and the judiciary’s job to apply the asylum rules – not the Church.

But the Church of England’s guidance gives information to clergy on how to “mount a personal campaign” if an application is refused. It does not give much advice on how to discern whether these conversions are authentic, long-standing and life-changing. While it is true that most clergy are experienced enough to deal with these sorts of pastoral situations, the Church should do more to insist that baptism preparation is rigorous.

The truly depressing thing about this is that Christian converts in some countries are among the most persecuted minorities in the world. Genuine converts in countries where a considerable risk is taken by “apostasising” find themselves undermined by a handful of false cases where people are gaming the system.

In recent years, church leaders have been slow to come forward to join me in making representations to the Home Office and the UNHCR, to ensure that flows of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan have included persecuted Christians. I am Patron of Barnabas Aid, a charity founded in the UK, which has supported hundreds of persecuted Syrian and Afghan Christians in gaining asylum in countries like Australia and Brazil. But the UK government has never accepted a single one of these most persecuted Christian converts living in daily fear in hostile environments …

… Our politicians and church leaders should do much more to listen to the voices of those struggling communities which feel alienated and marginalised by unprecedented rates of immigration.

And those seeking asylum should only be given that honour on the strict understanding that they must leave behind the political and moral structures of their former societies that are incompatible with the open, democratic values of their new homes.

Well said!!

On Monday, February 12, Christian Today had an article about the Bishop of Chelmsford Guli Francis-Dehqani’s appearance on the BBC Sunday Programme. Francis-Dehqani is an Iranian refugee herself and has been vociferous in the House of Lords on the Safety of Rwanda Bill, which was still being debated there yesterday, the 14th. Debates will continue when the Lords reconvene.

Christian Today stated:

Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani appeared on the BBC Sunday Programme to discuss claims that the Church of England has been complicit in asylum seekers gaming the system with fake conversions.

She said that “inevitably” there would be “a small number of cases” of people trying to “scam us”, but that preparation for baptism was “very rigorous” and that some people even abandon it because it takes too long.

“We take seriously our responsibilities, but we also know that as Christians, our primary responsibility is one of welcome and hospitality and support and teaching, but we need to do that in a way that is that is wise and, and is aware that occasionally there are people who might try and scam us,” she said.

The bishop, who came to Britain as a refugee from Iran, said she was open to a review of the Church of England’s current guidance for vicars around conversion, but added that there could never be complete certainty.

“It’s very difficult to look into the hearts of people ever and be 100 per cent. And that goes for whether that person is from Britain or an immigrant from elsewhere,” she said …

Later in the discussion she said that the onus was on clergy to “be as confident as they possibly can be” that a candidate for baptism is sincere and understands what it means.

“Preparation is in most cases very rigorous and that’s right and proper. I think, God forbid, you do take that seriously regardless of where people are coming from. It’s just that in the end, it’s impossible to prove 100 per cent,” she said.

… she said it was “wrong” that attention was being focused on “a very small number” of alleged abuses because “it’s diverting attention away from the systemic problems, which is that we have an immigration system that’s overwhelmed and inefficient”.

Seriously, I do not think that preparation for baptism in the Church of England is ‘in most cases very rigorous’. I don’t believe that for one second. It probably is in my church, but seeing how woke our clergy are, it probably isn’t elsewhere.

You can read more about Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani’s views in her Telegraph article of February 5.

Bogus conversions are key in avoiding deportation

The biggest showstopper came on Monday, February 12, with The Times‘s article, ‘Revealed: How judges let criminals use Christianity to escape deportation’:

Murderers, sex offenders and drug dealers are among migrants who have escaped deportation by claiming they have converted to Christianity, The Times has found …

In one case, a Bangladeshi man who had served 12 years in prison for murdering his wife successfully appealed against the Home Office’s attempts to deport him, saying he was a Christian convert and that he would be at risk in his predominantly Muslim community in Bangladesh.

A judge allowed him to stay in the UK based on rights enshrined in Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which prevents removal where there are substantial grounds for believing that an individual would face serious harm from torture or from inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment …

The findings come from a Times analysis of asylum judgments that lays bare the scale of the abuse of Britain’s immigration system by foreign criminals who claim they are Christian converts to escape deportation …

Analysis suggests that Iranians have been the most successful in avoiding deportation. In several cases, a claimant’s deportation was blocked even when the judge hearing their appeal concluded that their conversion was not genuine. Judges said that even the “perception” of being a Christian could result in lashes in Iran.

One case involved an Iranian who had been sentenced to 18 months in prison for assault in the UK and was scheduled for deportation by the Home Office. The man appealed and a judge ruled that he could not be deported, despite concluding that he was “not a Christian convert”, because he had covered his arms in tattoos “dominated by Christian imagery” and the Iranian authorities would believe he had converted.

In another case an Iranian man convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to seven and a half years in jail successfully appealed against deportation on the grounds that he had converted. He said that he had a tattoo of a cross, and would therefore be at risk in Iran. An Upper Tribunal judge ordered that his case be reheard after a Home Office appeal.

Appeals heard in the Upper Tribunal can add to an already severe backlog in the asylum system:

The Times has analysed thousands of Upper Tribunal cases heard since 2018 …

While many fail to convince judges that their conversion is genuine or that it would result in persecution, their appeals often delay their deportation by several months and in some cases years. They have also added to the long backlog of immigration cases, costing the taxpayer large sums in accommodation costs.

The Upper Tribunal covers only a fraction of the total number of asylum hearings and is the only stage at which judgments are published. Most individuals are granted anonymity.

Before reaching the Upper Tribunal court, cases are first heard by Home Office caseworkers and refusals can be appealed to the First-Tier Tribunal.

Since January 2023 there have been 28 cases heard at the Upper Tribunal in which a claimant cited conversion to Christianity as a reason to be granted asylum, about 1 per cent of cases heard in the period. Of those, seven appeals were approved, 13 dismissed and the judge ordered a new hearing in eight cases.

Five of the seven migrants granted the right to stay had been convicted of serious criminal offences.

Some judges are discerning, such as the one in this case:

One case involved a Pakistani man who arrived as a student but overstayed his visa and claimed asylum, claiming that his evangelical preaching in the UK would put him in danger because he would either engage in activities that would put him at risk or would have to refrain from doing so to avoid the risk.

The judge noted that a reverend had vouched for the man’s Christianity in oral evidence, despite the asylum seeker never attending his church. All the man did to evidence his newly found evangelism was to “hand out leaflets outside Tooting Tube station” with the reverend.

The judge also said that the man only discovered his evangelical calling after his first asylum claim was refused.

Now we come to comic relief as asylum seekers explain their understanding of Christianity:

There were several cases involving migrants claiming to have converted to Christianity who failed to answer the most basic questions about their apparent faith.

An Iranian woman claimed asylum on arrival at an airport in 2020, saying that she had converted to Christianity from Islam. Being returned to Iran would breach her rights under the ECHR because she would not be able to practise her faith, she claimed.

But the judge in her case concluded she was not a genuine Christian and believed she may have duped a church into granting her a baptism certificate. She failed a series of simple questions about Christianity, saying for example that Lent, which precedes Easter, was a “celebration four weeks before Christmas when you light a candle”.

An Iranian man who was sentenced to four years in jail for drug and driving offences and resisting arrest managed to get his deportation order overturned despite referring to “Black Friday” rather than “Good Friday” and getting the denomination of his church wrong.

One asylum seeker admitted that he attended a synagogue for more than a month without realising that he was not in a Christian church.

One tribunal judge doubted that a claimant was “attracted to Christianity because it fulfilled a deep spiritual need”, given that they had told the court that “being a Christian is freedom and you can drink alcohol and be with girls”.

Another asylum seeker was unable to tell an interviewing officer the story of Easter, said incorrectly that Jesus had ten disciples, and was unable to say what day Christmas fell on.

Churches reconsider rules

The Times says that, in light of recent revelations about bogus conversions, the Baptists and the Anglicans are reconsidering their guidance:

The Times can reveal that Baptist ministers will be told that they must “exercise wisdom before considering supporting asylum claims”, in an update to guidance on converting migrants to Christianity.

Steve Tinning, who works for the public issues team of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, said it did have some guidance for ministers in giving evidence in asylum cases, but that this dated to 2018.

“The landscape has changed somewhat and so it is being reviewed this week,” he said at an event on Thursday. “I also agree that we can never be 100 per cent certain of the authenticity of any conversion.”

At the same event, a Church of England bishop said for the first time that the church was willing to review its guidance for priests to see “if it can be enhanced” to guide clergy on dealing with asylum seekers who wish to be baptised.

Even the Bishop of Chelmsford has now admitted that the CofE should look at the matter again:

The bishop of Chelmsford, the Right Rev Guli Francis-Dehqani, who was born in Iran, said: “I don’t see why there would be any reason why we couldn’t look at that guidance again to see if it needs updating and refreshing, if it can be enhanced in any way. I think there would be openness to that.”

Conclusion

More work, rather than platitudes, needs do be done.

I hadn’t realised that so many of these claimants come from Iran. There must be an informal instruction there to claim asylum and go through a baptism while waiting to be processed.

St Paul must be rolling in his grave. He would not have approved of this at all.

Suella Braverman on the ‘industrial-scale’ migrant conversions to Christianity: Anglicans deny responsibility

My post yesterday on the recent history of questionable migrant conversions to Christianity was prescient as, serendipitously, Patrick Christys covered the same topic on his GB News broadcast of Tuesday, February 6, 2024.

Christys then went further, saying that he had been sent a document issued by the Church of England on how best to assist asylum claimants. Here is the P&E contents page:

Here is Christys’s editorial:

Earlier in the evening on GB News, Michelle Dewberry explored the topic. One of her guests, the former MEP and sister of Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, Annunziata Rees-Mogg labelled the Anglicans involved ‘gullible fools’:

I think it’s a cynical ploy to be allowed to stay in the UK, and there are gullible fools in the Church of England who think they’re doing good, when in fact they’re putting their own parishioners and the British public at risk.

She and the Rees-Mogg family are devout Catholics. She said that it takes at least one year to convert to Catholicism. Here is the video:

Today at Prime Minister’s Questions, Conservative MP Tim Loughton asked about Anglican involvement in migrant conversions. Rishi Sunak replied that the Government was looking into the matter.

We have a serious problem on our hands, doubtless from a cultural difference arising in British society. Another matter has been going on for at least two decades, that of grooming gangs. Everyone knows about them, so it was dismaying to see the following headline show up in one of our newspapers this week, especially as we have a Conservative government (bold in the original):

Grooming gang review kept secret as Home Office claims releasing findings ‘not in public interest’

Exclusive: Freedom of information request refused so ministers have ‘safe space’ to discuss policy

However, that is a matter for another day. I did cover a harrowing GB News documentary on the subject in 2023.

2024: the migrant chemical attacker, another Christian convert

On Wednesday, January 31, a terrifying chemical attack on a London woman and her two young daughters took place in Clapham, south of the Thames.

The suspect, Abdul Ezedi, a violent illegal migrant who was later granted asylum, remains on the run as I write. Grainy videos and photos show him with a burnt out right eye going about afterwards in the capital. Who could miss him?

I find that incredible, given all the CCTV cameras around London and the rest of the UK, which have been in place since Tony Blair (PM between 1997 and 2007) thought they were an excellent way to reduce crime. They have not helped much at all.

The suspect was based in Newcastle then travelled to London to carry out his heartless attack.

The woman’s neighbours ran out of their homes that evening to help, at great physical expense. On Saturday, February 3, The Times reported their experience (emphases mine):

A City worker has recounted how his partner tackled the suspected chemical attacker Abdul Ezedi as he app­eared to be trying to harm a three-year-old child, giving a dramatic new witness account.

The couple were among the first on the scene in Clapham, south London, last week. The woman, who is in her fifties and also works in finance, ran out of her home when she heard screaming.

She saw a man, thought to be Ezedi, 35, attacking a “vulnerable” woman, 31, and her two daughters, aged eight and three. She did not realise that the victims were covered in a corrosive chemical.

“We had no idea any substance was involved; only that the guy was clearly intent on hurting the [three-year-old],” the witness said. “He then went to pick the child up off the road to do it [throw the child to the ground] again, which is when my partner lunged in and tackled him, grabbing his leg and falling to the ground in the process like a rugby tackle.”

He has arm injuries; his partner suffered burns and may have permanent damage to her eyes. She has “burnt both eyeballs” and has been seeing specialists every day.

The National Crime Agency, Britain’s equivalent of the FBI, was drafted in by the Met on Saturday night to help find Ezedi. Officers from the agency are focusing on whether he may be receiving help from an organised crime group to evade capture.

Ezedi had said he was in a ­relationship with the 31-year-old woman, according to a close relative of the suspect quoted by Sky News. The victim and her daughters were confirmed to be residents of the Clapham South Belvedere Hotel, which other guests say is used as emergency accommodation.

Describing the aftermath of the attack, the Clapham witness said: “My partner immediately starts saying she has sharp pain in her eye. She thinks at the time that she has detached her retina, but then I start feeling pain on my arms and realise it could be acid.

“I have no doubt that if my partner had not jumped in then the child would no longer be with us, and if our other neighbours hadn’t immediately taken the family and washed them down then their injuries would have been far worse.”

The Met said the adult victim was sedated on Friday, with “life-changing” injuries. The injuries to her daughters were not as bad as originally thought and are “not likely to be life-changing”.

The search for Ezedi, an asylum seeker thought to have arrived in the UK in 2016 from Afghanistan on the back of a lorry, entered its fourth day on Sunday. As well as the National Crime Agency, the Metropolitan Police have drafted in the British Transport Police and Northumbria police.

The Home Office is reviewing how Ezedi was granted asylum in 2020, having been prosecuted for sex offences. In 2018, he was convicted of sexual assault and indecent exposure and at Newcastle crown court was given a 45-week suspended prison sentence and placed on the sex offenders register for 10 years.

His asylum application was twice rejected by the Home Office. On his third attempt, an appeal to an immigration tribunal, he appears to have claimed that he had converted to Christianity. A priest vouched for his newfound faith and said he was “wholly committed”. He was granted asylum.

A shopkeeper in Newcastle upon Tyne, where Ezedi was living in a hostel for the homeless, said that despite his conversion to Christianity, as per his asylum application, Ezedi gave the appearance of still adhering to his Muslim faith. An assistant at the Sultan supermarket said Ezedi regularly bought Halal meat. “I know he didn’t have a wife because he spoke about how he wanted a wife and hoped to return to Afghanistan to find a bride.”

It raises questions over the Church of England’s practice of handing out certificates to converts which verify their conversion and are used in asylum applications.

In 2021 it emerged that the Liverpool Women’s Hospital bomber, Iraqi-born Emad al-Swealmeen, had been baptised at Liverpool Cathedral. An inquest was told that he may have faked his conversion …

He was the man about whom I wrote yesterday. Doubts about his conversion were confirmed as far back as December 2021, the month after the attack on Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

The article continues, describing how the attack unfolded:

The attack happened at about 7.30pm on Wednesday. A man can be seen on CCTV ramming a car into two people in the road, who look to be the mother and eldest child, covering their faces.

According to an onlooker, he then pulled the three-year-old out of the back seat, “slamming” her onto the road, where she landed on her head and lay “lifeless”, while her mother apparently yelled “I can’t see”. Witnesses said that Ezedi threw a corrosive substance over the mother and elder daughter, before ramming them with his car.

Twelve people were taken to hospital, including five police officers. Many of them were treated for burns from the alkaline substance. Another neighbour who went to help, Rachael, 36, told The Sunday Times that she had suffered third-degree burns.

Ezedi was next seen boarding a Tube at Clapham South station. He was last seen on Wednesday at 9pm, when he got on a Victoria Line train southbound from King’s Cross station, with what looked like severe burns on his right eye.

After raids on two addresses in east London and three in Newcastle, the police located “two empty containers with corrosive warnings on the label”. They are still undertaking tests on the substance.

Britain now has the highest number of recorded chemical attacks in the world, mostly on women, with a total of 710 in 2022 compared with 421 in 2021.

Hmm. I wonder why that is — or not.

Former Home Secretaries Braverman and Patel blame Anglicans

Before I go into what Suella Braverman and Dame Priti Patel said about questionable conversions, here is another loopy Anglican policy.

For those who don’t live here, we have many Church of England affiliated schools. This is their policy on sexual identity, notably:

… not being transgender is not a protected characteristic.

Now on to what our former Home Secretaries had to say in the wake of the chemical attack. Incidentally, Braverman was raised as a Buddhist and Patel as a Hindu.

On Saturday, February 3, The Telegraph reported:

Suella Braverman and Dame Priti Patel have hit out at Britain’s churches over their alleged support for “bogus” asylum claims.

Writing for The Telegraph, Mrs Braverman said that during her time as home secretary she “became aware of churches around the country facilitating industrial-scale bogus asylum claims”.

Separately, Dame Priti, also a former home secretary, accused church leaders of “political activism” in their approach to asylum seekers, claiming that religious institutions supported cases “without merit”.

The clergy’s role in offering conversions to asylum seekers and support for their applications is likely to be considered by ministers in the wake of the chemical attack in London that injured a mother, two children and 10 others.

Abdul Ezedi, suspected of carrying out a chemical attack in Clapham, was twice denied asylum before being allowed to stay after claiming he had converted from Islam and that his life would be in danger if he returned to Afghanistan.

A government source said: “There are clearly general questions about whether it is really possible to credibly substantiate the solidity of a religious conversion, particularly where that view might carry important implications.”

We also learned an interesting fact relating to Al-Swealmeen’s conversion at Liverpool Cathedral in 2017:

Ms Patel cited the case of Emad Jamil Al Swealmeen, a Christian convert who detonated a bomb outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital in 2021, having been confirmed at Liverpool Cathedral in 2017.

In 2016, the then dean of the cathedral said he had converted 200 asylum seekers in four years, but added: “I can’t think of a single example of somebody who already had British citizenship converting here with us from Islam to Christianity.”

Dame Priti said: “In that particular case [Al Swealmeen] and any other examples where Christian conversion is involved it is right that those cases are scrutinised and that there is a degree of honesty in establishments, including the Church of England as to what their motivations were.

“It’s no coincidence that religious leaders are constantly speaking out against any reforms and work introduced by us as Conservatives in this area …

Mrs Braverman said: “Attend mass once a week for a few months, befriend the vicar, get your baptism date in the diary and, bingo, you’ll be signed off by a member of clergy that you’re now a God-fearing Christian who will face certain persecution if removed to your Islamic country of origin. It has to stop.”

A Church of England spokesman said: “It is the role of the Home Office, and not the church, to vet asylum seekers and judge the merits of their individual cases.”

The church was not aware of any links with Ezedi.

Catholic Church finds no link with Ezedi

With the Anglicans finding no links with Ezedi, it was the turn of the Catholic Church to investigate, as a ‘priest’ had allegedly given him a reference. ‘Priest’ means Anglican or Catholic.

On February 5, the Catholic Herald said that the suspect was unknown to the diocese covering Newcastle, although he did use refugee services from the diocesan Justice and Peace Project:

The Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle today denied assisting an Afghan fugitive wanted for an alkaline attack on a woman and her two children amid claims that an unnamed priest helped him to gain asylum in the UK.

Abdul Shokoor Ezedi is suspected of throwing a corrosive substance over the three in Clapham, south London, on 31 January, leaving the 31-year-old woman with such “life-changing” injuries to her face that she is being kept under sedation in hospital. Her two daughters, aged eight and three, are being treated for burns …

The Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle has come under pressure from the media to identify any priest who might have assisted Ezedi with his successful application.

A diocese spokesman says exhaustive checks have failed to produce any evidence that the Catholic Church assisted Ezedi beyond the provision of toiletries and food tokens from the diocesan Justice and Peace Project.

“After checking local parish records and central records and after consulting with clergy we have no indication that Abdul Ezedi was received into the Catholic Faith in this diocese, or that a Catholic priest of this diocese gave him a reference,” the spokesman says. “We do not know which Christian church received him nor which Christian minister gave him a reference.”

The spokesman confirmed that Ezedi “visited our diocesan Justice and Peace Refugee Project, a charitable venture which assists a wide range of people who come to us in need”. 

He added: “The diocese will assist the police investigations in any way we can. We keep the victims in our prayers and hope that justice is done soon.”

The Justice and Peace Refugee Project gives support only in the form of food and toiletries to clients referred by the St Vincent de Paul Society. It directs clients to further support that might be available from other organisations; in a minority of hardship cases it gives out supermarket vouchers. 

The project is not involved in any casework around asylum claims and therefore does not employ caseworkers. Nor does it seek to recruit converts to Christianity. 

Government ministers: ‘not about asylum’

On Sunday and Monday, Conservative ministers doing the media rounds played down any potential negative publicity surrounding the chemical attack.

Guido Fawkes wrote about the Education Secretary Gillian Keegan, a lightweight if there ever was one, although, according to her academic record, she is a genius. On Sunday:

The Education Secretary landed herself in hot water yesterday for claiming Clapham attack case was “not really about asylum” on Sky News …

On Monday, it was the turn of Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris, who is equally unconvincing as a Cabinet member. The Telegraph told us:

Chris Heaton-Harris has insisted Abdul Ezedi would have been detained and deported if the Government’s Nationality and Borders Bill had been in place.

Asked whether he agreed with his colleague Gillian Keegan’s remark that the focus around the alkali attack is “not really about asylum,” he told LBC: “We know as a Government we need to tighten those (powers) further and that’s what we’re trying to do with our Rwanda Bill.

“This was an unbelievably tragic occurrence. Everybody that I know has been completely shocked by it. But we’ve tightened our laws since and he would not be here had we had the Nationality and Borders Bill in place and he’d been detained and deported properly.”

Yet, according to the Home Office’s testimony before the parliamentary Home Affairs Select Committee on Wednesday, January 31, even the new Nationality and Borders Bill doesn’t allow for illegal entrants to be turned back. Civil servants said that illegals must still be taken in because the Home Office must be in no doubt about sending them back. If there is a scintilla of doubt, they will be accommodated on our shores.

The topic came up on Nigel Farage’s February 7 GB News show (first segment after the news and editorial), wherein a human rights lawyer explained the same thing. Also, he pointed out that these people are released on ‘bail’, which, in their case means, recognisance only as they do not have any money:

Anglican bishop hits back at Braverman

Later on Monday, February 5, The Telegraph carried an article about an Anglican prelate, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, the Bishop of Chelmsford, ‘Bishop hits back over Suella Braverman’s claims asylum seekers are faking Christian conversion’:

A bishop has attacked Suella Braverman after she said that churches were fuelling fake asylum claims …

The Church of England has rejected Mrs Braverman’s criticism, with the Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, writing in The Telegraph on Monday: “We are not politicians, and we know that to be involved in political debate can be bruising.

“But those who have claimed a link between the abuse of our asylum system and the action of bishops in parliament are simply wrong. 

“It is saddening to see this being implied by former holders of senior ministerial office, who have had opportunity but not sought to raise these concerns with senior clergy before.”

Dr Francis-Dehqani, who will become the lead bishop on immigration later in February, denied that the Church was in any way responsible for the criminal history of converted asylum seekers.

The bishop repeated the usual Church of England disclaimer:

Churches have no power to circumvent the Government’s duty to vet and approve applications – the responsibility for this rests with the Home Office.

Furthermore:

The bishop also denied that church support for asylum seekers’ claims amounted to a “magic ticket” for entry to the UK, adding that the notion that a person may be “fast-tracked through the asylum system, aided and abetted by the Church is simply inaccurate”.

The Bishop of Chelmsford is one of the Lords Spiritual, as is the Archbishop of Canterbury. Both speak in the House of Lords on the compassion the British government owes to asylum claimants, even when arriving in their tens of thousands every year. They give nary a thought to the British people who need to live with these claimants.

The Bibby Stockholm converts: not a miracle

The latest conversion story to take the UK by storm was the Sunday, February 4 headline about the illegals on the Bibby Stockholm barge, moored near Portland in Dorset, on the south coast of England. Portland has historically been known for its fine quality stone.

Halfway through the weekend, we woke up to this Telegraph headline:

The article says:

… on Sunday, David Rees, a church elder and education consultant, told the BBC’s Sunday programme that 40 asylum seekers on the Bibby Stockholm had converted or were in the process of becoming Christians.

“Local faith leaders have visited the barge and work with the council and the barge management in looking after these guys,” he said, adding that the migrants had either converted in their home countries or on Christian Alpha or other courses in the UK.

The Alpha course, which introduces worshippers to the faith, was taken by Emad Al Swealmeen, the Liverpool bomber. The Iraqi asylum seeker blew himself up outside a maternity hospital in 2021, four years after his confirmation at the city’s cathedral.

Mr Elder [David Rees?? — c’mon, get it right] said he was confident that all the 40 Bibby Stockholm migrants were undergoing genuine conversions.

“Obviously, we need to make sure that they believe in the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit and repent of their sins and also they want to start a new life in the church,” he said.

“So those are the sort of questions that we ask them, and they have to give a public testimony, at their baptism, which they did in their native language, and it was translated into English. There were no qualms at all about the content of that testimony, which was clear and conclusive about their faith in Jesus Christ.”

Tim Loughton, the aforementioned Conservative MP who asked Rishi Sunak a question at PMQs on February 7, was less sure:

Tim Loughton, a member of the home affairs committee and a former minister, said he was concerned that Christian conversion had become a scam, claiming there were cases in which some asylum seekers had got crucifix tattoos to reinforce their claims.

“We have got to have a much more rigorous scrutiny process for those claiming to have converted and the basis on which it would be dangerous to return them to their home countries,” he said.

However, the Home Office, which his colleague, James Cleverly MP heads as our latest Home Secretary, appeared to disagree:

The Home Office said caseworkers were trained to be able to establish the credibility of claims around religious beliefs so that protection was only granted to those in genuine need.

Guidance tells them to assess a claim “in the round” and not take the word of a priest as “determinative”. An asylum seeker’s participation in church activities must be considered, along with the timing of their conversion, knowledge of the faith, and the opinions of other congregation members as to the genuineness of the conversion.

Sorry, but that is not happening. What are other congregation members going to say if these converts are potentially intimidating? Ask yourselves what you might say if faced with that question.

Conclusion

Let us return to Suella Braverman’s experience as an immigration lawyer and Home Secretary from her February 3 article in The Telegraph:

For years, I defended the Home Office in immigration cases as a barrister and saw the reality of our broken asylum system. Then, it was sham marriages and bogus colleges that allowed migrants to game our system.

But, as Home Secretary, I saw how the racketeering has continued, and expanded in myriad ways.

Today, it is adults claiming to be children, Muslims pretending to be Christians, heterosexuals feigning homosexuality, healthy people alleging mental illness, economic migrants impersonating refugees fleeing persecution, those who have chosen to come here arguing that they have been trafficked as slaves, or those masquerading as political dissidents.

Many asylum seekers are genuine and it’s right that we offer help when their cause is just. But far too many are bogus and using our laws against us …

It has to stop. We must get wise to the problem. It is no wonder that the former dean of Liverpool Cathedral noted that he converted about 200 asylum seekers to Christianity over a four-year period – but he doesn’t recall baptising any Muslim who was already a British citizen.

It’s why I set up a dedicated taskforce focused on rooting out the grifters enabling this sordid business. Through more reporting, increased investigations and tougher enforcement, it has succeeded in identifying some of the bad actors. This work must continue in earnest.

Our system remains broken when asylum seekers convicted of sex offences may remain in the UK. Once you break our laws, surely you forfeit any right to stay here? We need a system whereby foreign offenders automatically lose their right to claim asylum or plead modern slavery. No exceptions, no caveats.

Now, you’ll say: why didn’t you fix it when you had the chance as Home Secretary? Well, during the past year, we increased the number of removals of foreign offenders and those illegally here – an improvement on previous years and back to pre-Covid levels.

But the real reason we have not yet got to the bottom of the problem is that every time the Government passed yet another law, we balked at the chance to exclude the vague and evolving rules contained in international law, be it the Refugee Convention, the European Convention on Human Rights or the Human Rights Act.

While in government, I pushed to exclude these treaties from our asylum law, but to no avail. I laid out proposals on how to cut the Gordian knot of human rights law that is the root cause of the problem. These instruments stymie our ability to control who comes into our country, who stays here and who must leave.

The reality of government is that if the consensus is not with you, then even as Home Secretary you will not prevail. Instead, we got tweaks, compromises and half-measures. Post-Brexit, we did not take back control. Rather, we have ceded it to international law, a foreign court, and activist judges and lawyers.

I don’t seek to demonise those who, understandably, seek a better life abroad. Hundreds of millions of people live in poor conditions around the world and will have a profound desire to better themselves and their families. My own parents had that same deep longing when they emigrated – lawfully – to the UK from Kenya and Mauritius in the 1960s.

People may come here lawfully, in an orderly manner. But what we are talking about with illegal immigration is the deception, criminality and playing of the system that so defines our asylum policy in the 21st century.

We can dance around the issue for years to come, but the truth is that our government will always be limited in what it can do unless it withdraws from the European Convention on Human Rights. The jurisprudence from the Strasbourg Court that is binding in the UK has taken a broad and ever-expansive approach to the very noble rights set out in the original text. We’ve tried working within its boundaries for decades, but that approach has failed.

We can no longer allow amorphous concepts of international law to override the supremacy of Parliament, especially in matters of vital national interest. We cannot have fought for freedom, self-government and a voice for the British people in 2016 only to afford foreign offenders greater rights than their law-abiding victims.

The British people have voted time and time again for proper control of our borders. Yet we still have dubious characters coming to our country illegally every week. It is no wonder people are giving up on politics. This is a national-security and public-safety emergency. Gang warfare, terrorism, drugs, rape, murder, acid attacks – those capable of such heinous crimes will keep coming until we get serious, put the British people first, and pass the hard-headed laws required to properly secure our border.

Suella’s right. Dame Priti is right.

However, some people are just dead against doing right by the British taxpayers — the people who pay the salaries of Government ministers, MPs from all parties, civil servants and asylum-friendly charities, partly financed by the Government (i.e. us).

European church news: questionable conversions to Christianity from 2016 to 2021

Over the past 20 years, clandestine migrants to Europe have not been strangers to converting to Christianity.

The same holds true in the United Kingdom, which I will get to in a moment.

Recent history

In 2005, a few British tabloids ran several front page articles on marriages of convenience between Britons and non-EU migrants. In 2016, I wrote about that phenomenon and what happened in the years that followed. Our courts ruled that the Church of England had special privileges, therefore, a Home Office Certificate of Approval was not required for this kind of wedding in an Anglican church. By 2008, it was estimated that the number of bogus weddings had increased by 400 per cent. London’s Diocese of Southwark found that applications for migrant-Briton wedding ceremonies rose from 90 in 2004 to 493 in 2015.

That same post then discussed the numbers of migrant conversions going on in the Lutheran Church in Germany with few questions asked. However, Catholic bishops in Austria took a dim view of migrants seeking to convert. In the Archdiocese of Vienna, priests were encouraged to interview potential converts during their year of spiritual and catechetical preparation prior to baptism. The Archdiocese’s figures showed that between 5 and 10 per cent of candidates dropped out afterwards. That was back in 2016.

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, I wrote (emphases mine):

In England, however, Anglican clergy are eager to not only ask no questions but to combine the conversion process with helping to ease the refugee application process.

The Guardian interviewed the Revd Mohammad Eghtedarian, an Iranian refugee and convert who was later ordained. He is a curate at Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral. Eghtedarian says that refugee status and religious affiliation are intertwined.

Liverpool Cathedral has a process which involves registering refugee attendance, which helps their asylum applications. A candidate for Baptism must attend the five preparatory classes. A baptised refugee seeking Confirmation must attend a dozen courses.

Hmm. It sounds very minimal.

The Guardian asked Eghtedarian about the sincerity of those candidates. Even he acknowledged that ‘plenty of people’ were converting for convenience!

In large part, only a cursory examination exists. The Cathedral will also provide a ‘letter of attendance’ to immigration authorities, if requested.

The article said that the Church of England does not record conversions, regardless of background, because it could be a ‘sensitive’ issue.

It seems the Austrian Catholic bishops have approached the conversions of convenience issue more sensibly than the German Lutherans, who resent that immigration court judges ask refugees to discuss their newly-found beliefs in detail in order to assess their sincerity.

It is the responsibility of clergy to do a thorough examination of heart and mind during the conversion process rather than let false converts through the doors for Baptism and Confirmation.

2021 Liverpool hospital bomber, a high-profile convert

On Remembrance Sunday 2021, Emad Jamil Al-Swealmeen, a Jordanian who failed to have his request for asylum granted, set off a bomb at Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

Interestingly, he was a convert to Christianity, a process he went through at Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral.

On the day, he jumped into a taxi and asked to be taken to Liverpool Cathedral, where the Remembrance Sunday parade ended. However, with so many road closures, the taxi could not get through, so Al-Swealmeen asked the driver, Dave Perry, to take him to the hospital instead.

Perry got Al-Swealmeen to the hospital entrance three minutes before 11 a.m., at which time Liverpudlians, along with the rest of the nation, observed a two-minute silence.

A bomb went off in the taxi. Dave Perry, thankfully, was able to escape — in six seconds. Al-Swealmeen died in the blaze. Fortunately, no one at the hospital, which, given its name, has a maternity unit, was harmed.

Police arrived at the scene at 11:04.

The Sun carried a report on the incident on November 14, excerpted below:

Brave Dave Perry leapt from the car and locked the doors as the device exploded at Liverpool Women’s Hospital yesterday – killing only the male passenger who carried the bomb.

Last night, David was stable in hospital with burns and shrapnel injuries, including damage to his ear.

Cops believe the device was a homemade bomb, “built by the passenger” who died, head of North West terror policing Russ Jackson said …

… cabbie Kev Cuthbertson posted: “It’s my mate who got blown up. He’s in a bad, bad way.

“He’s a fellow driver on delta. He’s had his ear sewn back on, got burns and shrapnel wounds and other pretty serious injuries. He is a hero. When he noticed the bomb, he locked the scumbag in the car. But took the brunt of the blast.”

Last night, an online fundraising page was set up to help David.

The organiser wrote: “His quick-thinking possibly saved a lot of lives.”

The car blew up in Liverpool at 10.59am, killing its “suspicious-looking” passenger as the country prepared to mark the Fallen at 11am.

Pals of the injured taxi driver, who was in a stable condition last night, said he acted courageously to thwart a bombing of the hospital, where 30 babies are born each day.

Three men aged 21, 26 and 29 were later arrested elsewhere in the city under the Terrorism Act.

Police in the region confirmed they were treating the incident as a terror incident.

The blast occurred close to the ­Liverpool Cathedral which was hosting one of the country’s largest Remembrance Sunday services with more than 2,000 people. It is less than a mile from the hospital.

One source said Mr Perry grew suspicious after the passenger asked him to drive to the cathedral but then changed his mind …

The following day, November 15, The Sun told us more about Al-Swealmeen, who also went by the name Enzo Almeni:

POPPY Day bomber Emad Jamil Al-Swealmeen struck after his asylum bids were repeatedly turned down, it emerged last night.

The Jordanian, 32, also had mental health problems and was once arrested with a knife.

He blew himself up in a taxi at the Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Cabbie David Perry, 43, survived by a “miracle”.

Emad Jamil Al-Swealmeen, who had no known connections with any terrorist groups, blew himself to bits with a home-made ball-bearing device …

It remained unclear when exactly the bomber entered the UK but it was understood he had been in a long-term dispute with the Home Office over his application for UK residential status.

And he had not been granted leave to remain here permanently.

A source said: “One of the issues being looked at is whether this unresolved grievance pushed him over the edge and prompted him to carry out the attack.”

Here’s the conversion bit. Don’t miss the photo of the chap who took him in:

Following his arrival in the UK, Al-Swealmeen lived mostly in Liverpool, where he was supported by Christian ­volunteers from a network of churches helping asylum seekers.

According to friends, he earlier spent a large part of his life in Iraq, where his mother came from.

It was claimed that Al-Swealmeen had told friends he came from Syria — but The Sun understands he was a Jordanian national.

It was also claimed that motor-racing enthusiast Al-Swealmeen had changed his first name to Enzo in honour of Ferrari founder Enzo Ferrari — and to sound less Muslim in a bid to help his asylum ­application.

He was also said to have converted to Christianity at Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral in 2017.

Al-Swealmeen spent eight months living with devoted Christians Malcolm and Elizabeth Hitchott at their home in the Aigburth district of Liverpool.

Former solider Mr Hitchott said: “He first came to the cathedral in August 2015 and wanted to convert to Christianity.

“He took an Alpha Course, which explains the Christian faith, and completed it in November of that year.

“That enabled him to come to an informed decision and he changed from Islam to Christianity and was confirmed as a Christian just before he came to live with us.

“He was destitute at that time and we took him in. The UK asylum people were never convinced he was Syrian and he was refused asylum in 2014.

“He had his case rejected because he has been sectioned due to some mental health incident where he was waving a knife at people from an overpass.”

Mr Hitchott explained: “He was going to put in a fresh asylum claim. Once he had done that, it was possible for him to be housed again by the Home Office and get £35 a week.

“He didn’t want to stay here any more. So he could get the accommodation, I gave him notice to leave. He never talked about Islam, terrorism, nothing.”

Mrs Hitchott said: “I bumped into him in a street, he was doing cake decoration at an educational class, a formal course somewhere, he was very enthusiastic. He showed me the designs he had done and what he was hoping to do in an upcoming exam. He was quite artistic.

“I gave him a sketchbook and pencils. He drew hills, flowers, everything around him.”

The couple said he loved motor racing and would often do go-karting at Brunswick in Liverpool.

The bomb factory where Al-Swealmeen constructed his deadly ball bearing device was yesterday revealed as a bedsit.

Police carried out a controlled explosion at the studio room in a Victorian property in Rutland Avenue in the city’s upmarket Sefton Park district.

Meanwhile, Dave Perry’s wife told the paper how grateful she was that her husband survived the blast.

That incident disgusted many Britons, to put it mildly: not only the act but also when and where it happened.

They were even more disgusted when politicians offered their condolences to the bomber. Guido Fawkes had the gaffes and the videos.

First out of the gate on November 15 was Labour MP Jonathan Ashworth:

Guido posted Ashworth’s subsequent apology:

This is obviously embarrassing I misread the news ticker in an interview and thought a member of the public had now died. My deepest apologies for this mistake.

The next day, it was the turn of Conservative MP Oliver Dowden and another Labour MP Charlotte Nichols:

Guido wrote (red emphases his):

On Sky News yesterday morning, Oliver Dowden expressed his “deep sympathy for the person that’s lost their life”, and claimed that he was joining the Prime Minister in doing so. Although Boris only tweeted his support for “all those affected”, rather than towards anyone specific…

Later, Labour MP Charlotte Nichols posted a tweet claiming she was “sending love to the family and friends of the person who was killed in the incident”. The tweet has since been deleted.

To top it all off, the Mirror then posted a Facebook status saying “…police have now named the man who sadly died. RIP 💔”. The statement was swiftly edited to remove the heartbreak, although it’s still visible in the post history…

Guido also has screengrabs of the Mirror‘s posts, a sight to behold. Ugh. And they call themselves journalists.

More followed on the bomber, his motives — and the conversion.

On November 16, the Mail‘s erstwhile columnist Dan Wootton wrote:

I can’t get out of my head how close we came to a tragedy of unimaginable proportions in Liverpool on Sunday – and how little most of the media and our leaders seem to want to talk about it.

If terrorist Emad Jamil Al Swealmeen had been able to emerge from hero cabbie Dave Perry’s car and enter Liverpool Women’s Hospital and if he’d been a better bomb-maker the loss of life to mums, their newborn and NHS staff would likely have been catastrophic.

Or, if he’d got just around the corner to Liverpool Cathedral, where he had previously converted to Christianity – perhaps in a bid to fool us all – as veterans and their families were marking Remembrance Day, the carnage would have been equally devastating.

But he didn’t.

The moronic monster, who arrived in the UK from the Middle East seven years ago, became the latest terrorist on British shores to kill himself and no one else, meaning our woke, well-meaning Establishment can avoid the politically incorrect but completely necessary conversations our country must have.

Meanwhile, as familiar pictures of dozens of migrants crammed into inflatables show today, up to a thousand more illegal and undocumented migrants – the vast majority young men from who knows where – stream across the Channel every day to join our asylum system and, in most cases, never leave again …

More than 22,000 illegals have entered the country this year – many destroy their passports, throw their phone into the sea and tear up any other paperwork, meaning we have no idea of who we are letting in from France …

The horrifying reality is that some of the people on these boats may already be operating within terror cells. At least, they are ripe for radicalisation when their dream life in the UK turns out to be less than idyllic.

The government wants us to turn a blind eye to this problem because they cannot seem to solve it, no matter how much tough talk comes from the mouths of Boris Johnson and Priti Patel …

… the only heartless thing is to continue to ignore policy failures that are resulting in the threat of deadly terrorism on our shores.

It’s our responsibility to have these uncomfortable conversations and refuse to look away.

Don’t miss the photo of a smiling Al-Swealmeen in a Swan Vestas (!!) apron and chef’s toque, holding a glass of wine and cooking. There’s another photo of him in the same apron proudly displaying a pizza. Then there are photos of him standing near a front door which sports a heart wreath.

The next day, the Mail had more about the bomb and other raids the police had made in Liverpool since the incident. There was also this gem, along with a photo of the Hitchotts, the couple from the Cathedral who put him up for eight months in 2017:

Friends said they were astounded that the ‘quiet and bashful’ young man, who was also a big fan of country singer Johnny Cash, was behind the Poppy Day bomb.

On November 19, The Express reported:

Emad Al Swealmeen is believed to have been plotting the explosion for at least seven months.

Detectives have since traced the purchase of bomb making material to April 2021, around the time he was renting a flat on Rutland Avenue.

Merseyside Police also confirmed he booked and got the taxi he would go on to blow up and die in on Sunday.

On November 20, the paper provided an update:

Emad Al Swealmeen, 32, died when his bomb blew up outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital on Remembrance Sunday. Experts have now revealed it may have exploded prematurely when his taxi suddenly jolted to a stop.

The blast left taxi driver David Perry, 43, lucky to escape with just minor wounds before the vehicle was engulfed in flames.

Mr Perry may have put his brakes on suddenly at the hospital drop-off point, causing the explosion, it was said.

Russ Jackson, head of Counter Terrorism Policing North West, said the fact it detonated inside the taxi meant only the bomber was killed.

Experts believe had the bomb functioned as intended, metal fragments would have been flung in all directions, shredding the car and cutting down passers-by.

Mr Perry is thought to have escaped serious injury because the blast was largely confined to the back seat before the vehicle erupted in flames.

Mr Jackson added that they had found no links to the 2017 Manchester Arena attack.

Church of England denies responsibility

On November 17, two articles about Al-Swealmeen notional conversion appeared in the press.

The Express interviewed the Hitchcotts:

The bomber met Elizabeth Hitchcott and her lay preacher husband Malcolm after being baptised in 2015 and confirmed as a Christian at the Liverpool Cathedral in 2017. Days later the couple, both 77, of Aigburth, Merseyside, took him in for eight months. Mrs Hitchcott said: “The one thing I suppose to be thankful for is that he did not kill anyone else. “We are just so sad. We loved him. We were shocked when we heard what he had done.”

Ex-soldier Mr Hitchcott said Al Swealmeen claimed he converted to Christianity after becoming disillusioned with Islam.

He said: “He took an Alpha course, which explains the Christian faith. He was confirmed as a Christian just before he came to live with us.

Al Swealmeen first contacted the Hitchcotts after his asylum appeal was dismissed and he was “desperate” for somewhere to stay.

Mr Hitchcott said: “He arrived here on April 1 2017. He was with us then for eight months and during that time we saw him really blossoming in regards to his Christian faith.

“He really had a passion about Jesus that I wish many Christians had and he was ready to learn.

“He was keen on reading his Bible and every night we used to pray. We prayed for half an hour or so and studied the scriptures. We had a great time together. He was absolutely genuine, as far as I could tell.

“I was in no doubt by the time that he left us that he was a Christian.”

Mr Hitchcott said Al Swealmeen changed his name to Enzo Almeni to shorten it and make it more European, “not for any ulterior motive”.

He admitted however that he had not spoken to Al Swealmeen in four years and there may have been “changes in his personality and his beliefs” during that time. Al Swealmeen’s confirmation at Liverpool Cathedral was conducted by Bishop Cyril Ashton.

Bishop Ashton said: “It seems that sadly, despite this grounding, the bomber chose a different path for his life.”

Meanwhile, it emerged yesterday that the bomber, described as “artistic”, had taken a cake decorating course at the City of Liverpool College three years before the attack.

The college said it was “dismayed to hear of his involvement in the tragic events” on Sunday.

The Mail focused on the Church of England and migrant conversions. The article also has Al-Swealmeen’s Confirmation photos. One caption reads:

He was not seen by the church soon after he was confirmed amid claims the Church of England is aiding an abuse of the immigration system

The article says:

The Church of England today denied there is any link between their vicars converting Muslim migrants and systemic abuse of the asylum system after it was revealed the Liverpool suicide bomber had found Jesus and then appealed his own case.

Emad Al Swealmeen lost his first bid to stay in Britain in 2014 but appealed again in 2017 after he was confirmed at Liverpool Cathedral and his case was still outstanding when he blew himself up in a taxi on Sunday.

Vicars have been accused of aiding asylum seekers to ‘game’ the immigration system by helping hundreds to convert from Islam and ‘pray to stay’ in the UK as it emerged people smugglers are using Instagram to urge migrants to follow Jesus to help them gain British citizenship.

But in a statement the CofE said: ‘We are not aware of any evidence to suggest a widespread correlation between conversion to Christianity, or any other faith, and abuse of the asylum system’.

And in a barbed response to Home Office source claims that changing from Islam to Christianity is now ‘standard practice’ among asylum seekers ‘to game the system’, a spokesman said: ‘It is not the role of clergy to establish the legitimacy of asylum claims and to assess security implications’.

MPs are to demand a ­formal Parliamentary probe into whether fake Christian converts are duping the Church of England to avoid being deported back to strict Muslim countries they came from. If the inquiry goes ahead Priti Patel would likely be hauled in to give evidence after the Home Secretary said Al Swealmeen, who changed his name to Enzo Almeni shortly after finding Jesus, had exploited the UK’s asylum ‘merry-go-round’.

Tim Loughton, a senior Tory MP on the Home Affairs Select Committee, said: ‘There is a worrying new development where it appears certain asylum seekers are playing the religious card to avoid deportation to certain countries. This is gaming the system and something we must look into’.

Rev Mohammad Eghtedarian, then a clergyman at Liverpool Cathedral, admitted in 2016 that ‘plenty of people’ were lying about their intentions after it emerged that the Church of England had christened hundreds of asylum seekers under a scheme dubbed ‘pray to stay’. He said: ‘There are many people abusing the system… I’m not ashamed of saying that. But is it the person’s fault or the system’s fault? And who are they deceiving? The Home Office, me as a pastor, or God?’

It came as new statistics revealed that between January 2020 and June this year, 29% of all migrants arriving by boat say they are from Iran and 20% say they are from Iraq. 91% of all migrants came from just 10 countries – including Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Eritrea and Yemen. These are also nations named in the top 20 countries where Christians are the most persecuted for following Jesus …

Today it emerged that people traffickers have used social media sites such as Instagram to advertise crossings from France to the UK – and urge customers to consider conversion to Christianity to bolster their cases. Because the largest number of UK asylum seekers come from Muslim countries, they can also argue that their new faith would put their lives at risk if they returned to the home country.

One such advert, in Arabic, has a picture of Jesus and says finding God will lead to more successful asylum claims ‘in the shortest possible time with the lowest cost’.  

The Home Office has previously said converting to Christianity does not automatically result in a successful asylum claim. The Church of England has said baptism is ‘open to all’ and that it is up to the Government to vet asylum seekers, not them.

But Sam Ashworth-Hayes, of the counter-extremist Henry Jackson Society, said: ‘We know that people are willing to lie to win asylum up to and including faking religious conversions. This is incentivised by the asylum system, which does not do enough to root out fakes.’

Now back to Al-Swealmeen and Liverpool Cathedral:

Poppy Day bomber Emad Al Swealmeen was baptised in 2015 at Liverpool Cathedral and went on to be confirmed in 2017 after his claim for asylum was rejected in 2014. But the cathedral ‘lost contact’ with him the following year – with the bishop who carried out his confirmation service saying yesterday he had ‘no specific recollection’ of Al Swealmeen.

It emerged yesterday that Al Swealmeen was baptised as a Christian at Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral in 2015, one of around 200 asylum seekers to adopt the faith there over a four-year period.

It is understood this did not play a role in his asylum claims. But conversions are ‘standard practice’ among some asylum seekers, in particular those from Iran and Iraq, who seek to ‘game the system’, Home Office sources said. 

A counter-extremism think-tank last night called for an investigation into the ‘Liverpool Cathedral convert cluster’.

Oddly enough, in 2015, even Mr Hitchcott said that some asylum seekers were converting for convenience:

a lay minister at the cathedral – who would later take in Al Swealmeen [in 2017] – also warned that some asylum seekers ‘attend church with the sole purpose of advancing their asylum claims’.

The article looks at the Cathedral’s motives:

At the time of Al-Swealmeen’s baptism, Liverpool Cathedral was in the midst of a successful drive to both boost its congregation and embrace prospective converts.

More than 130 new converts of Iranian origin alone were baptised, with a total of 200 asylum seekers converting there between 2012 and 2016.

Liverpool was then a dispersal centre for asylum seekers, with volunteers helping to mentor new arrivals and help them access charity facilities and food banks.

In 2016 the Very Rev Peter Wilcox, then Dean of Liverpool and now Bishop of Sheffield, admitted some had ‘mixed motives’, adding: ‘Once you are a baptised Christian it is really not conceivable that you would be deported to a Muslim country.’ At the end of that year, Church Commissioners agreed £1million of funding to roll out the Anglican cathedral’s ‘multiplying congregations’ scheme across the diocese. And Liverpool Cathedral’s weekly average aggregate attendance had also risen to 702, from 438 in 2013.

Insiders stressed that the two-year ‘examination process’ of Christian conversion was ‘rigorous’ and designed to weed out opportunists.

Those applying for asylum go on to be challenged ‘strongly’ on their faith by the Home Office to check it is genuine …

The current Dean of Liverpool Cathedral last night suggested Al Swealmeen’s faith had been genuine, saying two years was a ‘long time’ to attend church for asylum reasons alone. The Very Rev Sue Jones added: ‘We can’t have responsibility for everyone. What we offer here is a safe space for asylum seekers.’

Bishop Cyril Ashton, who conducted Al Swealmeen’s confirmation service, said: ‘The church takes confirmation seriously… It seems that, sadly, the bomber chose a different path for his life’ …

Al Swealmeen is understood to have moved legally to the UK in 2014 from Dubai, where he spent his teenage years after allegedly being abused by his Syrian father.

Later that year his initial asylum application was turned down. It is understood his claim was ‘not compliant’ with Home Office rules. Al Swealmeen, who changed his name to Enzo Almeni after becoming a Christian, made a fresh asylum application in 2017 but this was rejected two years later.

His legal challenges were still under way when he died in the failed bomb attack.

Strangely enough, with all of those helpful conversions to those in need:

The cathedral is being treated as a potential target by counter-terror police. Its Remembrance Day service was taking place a mile from Liverpool Women’s Hospital at 11am on Sunday.

Al-Swealmeen is not the only failed asylum-seeker-convert to have committed an atrocity:

Khairi Saadallah, who killed three men in a rampage in a Reading park in June last year [2020], converted to Christianity more than a year before the attack. He twice failed to win asylum in 2012.

On November 22, one week after the attack, GB News’s Patrick Christys’s editorial was about the attack and the fact that politicians and media were sweeping it under the carpet. He rightly wondered what was going through the mind of cabbie Dave Perry and his grateful wife:

I very much doubt that Liverpudlian taxi driver David Perry and his family have moved on from the fact that he’s so lucky to be alive after a man blew himself up in the back of his car. I doubt they’ve stopped thinking about whether or not the Anglican church is actually complicit in a great big asylum swindle that sees people fraudulently convert to Christianity in a bid to remain in this country.

Tomorrow I will have a 2024 update: the latest horrific episode involving a convenient Christian convert and the finger-pointing between Church and state.

What’s on Anglican priests’ minds: a call for Justin Welby’s resignation, relating to Post Office scandal

Last Friday, I wrote about Britain’s Post Office scandal, which has been going on since 1999 and is only now, one hopes, coming to a favourable settlement with subpostmasters later this year.

My post provides a summary of the financial injustice done to subpostmasters, who are pillars of their communities, and of one of the personalities involved, Paula Vennells, who was a CEO of the Post Office during part of that time.

Last Tuesday, January 9, 2024, Ms Vennells says she handed back her CBE, awarded to her for services to the Post Office, although only the monarch has the ultimate power to revoke it.

On January 13, it was revealed that the then-Prime Minister Theresa May’s government pushed for Vennells to receive this honour in 2019. The Telegraph reported (emphases mine):

Theresa May’s government drove through a CBE for Paula Vennells, the former head of the Post Office, despite warnings made on the honours committee about the Horizon [Fujitsu UK accounting system] scandal, it has been reported.

… in which more than 900 Post Office workers were wrongly prosecuted after faulty software in the Horizon IT accounting system gave the appearance that money was missing from branches.

Handing back the honour, she said she was “truly sorry for the devastation” caused to sub-postmasters whose “lives were torn apart by being wrongly accused and wrongly prosecuted”.

Ms Vennells received a CBE – the second most prestigious below a knighthood or damehood – in the 2019 New Year Honours list.

The Sunday Times reported that at least one member of the main honours committee questioned the wisdom of giving her a CBE given the controversy over the Post Office’s treatment of sub-postmasters and the fact that she was still in the role.

According to the paper, a source with knowledge of the exchange said that concerns were “brushed aside”. Another source said that responsibility for highlighting potential concerns lay with the “sponsoring department”, in this case the Department for Business which nominated her for the award.

A senior civil servant meanwhile recalled that there had been a view that Ms Vennells had “inherited” the Horizon scandal and was “clearing up rather than being the cause”.

Ms Vennells served as chief executive of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019. Until 2015, the Post Office continued to bring private prosecutions over cash shortfalls at branches …

The main committee then confirms a list, which goes to the prime minister and ultimately the monarch.

A spokeswoman for Mrs May said: “The honours system is an independent process which awards honours to more than 2,000 people each year. As prime minister, the Rt Hon Theresa May MP always respected the independence of this system but thinks it is right Paula Vennells has handed back her CBE.”

The Times has more detail on what went on behind the scenes:

Sir Ian Cheshire, now chairman of Channel 4, chaired the sub-committee that recommended Vennells for the most prestigious honour below a knighthood or damehood.

Sources said she was nominated by the Department for Business, although Greg Clark, then business secretary, was not involved. Her name was discussed by the main honours committee, chaired by Sir Jonathan Stephens — then the civil servant responsible for Northern Ireland — in October 2018.

At the time, a group action brought by 555 sub-postmasters persecuted by the Post Office was about to reach trial in the High Court.

Mr Justice Fraser would the following year issue a damning indictment of the Post Office’s conduct, finding that the Horizon system had been defective, despite strenuous denials by the company and Vennells over many years …

A source close to Cheshire denied he brushed aside concerns and said that both committees were reassured about Vennells’ fitness for the honour by civil servants.

Vennells was named CBE in the 2019 new year honours list. In February that year, she announced that she was stepping down as chief executive of the Post Office and was appointed a non-executive director at the Cabinet Office …

Until 2015, the Post Office continued to bring private prosecutions over cash shortfalls at branches that were actually caused by glitches in an IT system supplied by the Japanese giant Fujitsu. “This was her reward for bending her conscience and holding the line,” the source claimed.

Here is where Welby starts to come in:

A source suggested Vennells, a part-time priest who had an unremarkable business career until she ran the Post Office from 2012 to 2019, was being rewarded by the government for taking a tough approach to controlling costs, including by refusing to acknowledge wrongdoing in its pursuit of sub-postmasters.

This cost control involved making the Post Office look attractive for a possible sale. Allegations are said to have revolved around a suspense account which was transferred to a profit account. It is also alleged that personal contributions from subpostmasters making up for their shortfalls caused by a faulty accounting system went into the suspense account. More needs to come out about that, but it is an interesting line.

For now, the article simply says:

The government kept hold of the Post Office when Royal Mail was privatised via a stock market float in 2013. But when Vennells was made chief executive, ministers were hoping to spin it off through a mutualisation process in which it would end up being owned by staff, like John Lewis department stores and Waitrose supermarkets.

With more than 11,500 branches, the Post Office was loss-making and reliant on a government subsidy: taxpayers contributed more than £1 billion during Vennells’s time in charge, although the annual amount was tapered from a peak of £210 million in 2013 to £60 million by 2019. Vennells said in a 2014 interview: “You’ve got to get to commercial sustainability before you can mutualise it.”

Here is more from the article about Vennells as an Anglican priest:

Vennells, 64, was for many years a part-time curate who took Sunday services at a church near her home in Bedford. In 2014, she said that her faith “influences my values and how I approach things” and that “I hear from my parishioners if the Post Office does something they don’t like … They have no compunction.”

Somehow she managed to get plum business appointments, although not everyone thinks she was the sharpest knife in the drawer:

She joined the Post Office in 2007 as network director, having started out as a graduate trainee at the consumer goods company Unilever before moving to L’Oréal, Dixons, Argos and Premier Inn owner Whitbread. Someone who worked with Vennells at an early stage of her career expressed surprise at her inclusion in the 2019 new year honours list. He said: “She was a perfectly nice and pleasant person, but she was never going to be one of our champion business leaders who achieved a huge turnaround. It smacked of ‘jobs for the boys’.”

On January 14, the Mail dredged up a Vennells talk in London from May 2018:

The Post Office was already mired in the Horizon IT scandal when its deeply-religious chief executive, Reverend Paula Vennells, agreed to take part in a panel discussion about business ethics.

The talk, attended by City firm executives, was held at London‘s Canary Wharf in May 2018. Apparently undeterred by the crisis unfolding on her watch – and certainly making no mention of it – Ms Vennells declared herself ‘proud of the Post Office… a really special organisation in terms of its values’.

After explaining how her values came ‘from the glory of God’, she turned to the subject of making mistakes.

‘When we mess up, which we do every day,’ she told the audience, ‘my faith tells me that I can be forgiven, that shortfalls are a perfectly human thing to do and that I can always start again; always, always, always, start again. You can put things right.

‘And for me, I found that very liberating because… you can get it wrong and you can move on.’

Would that she had shown the same mercy to the subpostmasters!

The article says likewise:

Alas! If recent events have shown anything it is that, in the temporal world at least, forgiveness is not quite so easy to come by.

It also points out:

… crucially, she stopped short of admitting responsibility for the debacle which saw more than 700 sub-postmasters prosecuted for crimes they hadn’t committed. Hundreds were left bankrupt, humiliated or in prison. Among those convicted, four committed suicide and 33 others have since died without seeing justice.

A fellow Christian among the subpostmasters told the Mail:

‘Forgiveness comes when you admit the mistakes you’ve made and atone for them,’ Tom Hedges, a 70-year-old former sub-postmaster in the village of Hogsthorpe, Lincolnshire, told the Mail.

Mr Hedges, who is also a lay minister and church warden, was wrongly convicted in 2010 of £60,000 worth of theft and false accounting and given a seven-month prison sentence. His conviction was overturned at the Court of Appeal in 2021.

‘It’s not as simple as saying sorry and moving on,’ he added. ‘We’ve had apologies from her before but they’re all couched in words along the lines that none of it was her fault. Before we can forgive, we need to hear the truth’ …

Former sub-postmaster Mr Hedges said: ‘She is now experiencing the wrath of public opinion that I and all the other innocent people felt when we were convicted and thrown out of our post offices.

‘My human and Christian side feels for her for that. But the other side of me thinks that she brought it upon herself.’

We learn more about Vennells’s life story:

Ms Vennells, the eldest of three children, grew up in Denton, five miles east of Manchester. Her father was an industrial chemist and later a research fellow at Manchester University. Her mother was a bookkeeper.

A keen Girl Guide, she won a funded place at private Manchester High School and, after graduating with a degree in French and Russian at Bradford University, was accepted on to Unilever’s graduate scheme before climbing the managerial ladder …

Ms Vennells, who likes to ski and sails dinghies, lives with her husband John, an engineer, in a £2million farmhouse in Bedfordshire.

Despite giving back her gong, she is now facing demands to hand back the £2.2million bonuses she got during her tenure as Post Office chief. Including her salary, she took home a total of £4.5million for that period.

In the weeks ahead, she is due to give evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry. Preparing her is the law firm Mishcon de Reya, which once represented the late Diana, Princess of Wales.

You have to have serious money in order to afford Mishcon de Reya.

She attempted to have an impartial examination of the Horizon system but sacked the firm when she didn’t care much for what they had uncovered:

In 2012, after she was promoted to chief executive, she brought in forensic accountant firm, Second Sight, to conduct an independent inquiry into the Fujitsu software. Before agreeing, Second Sight’s managing director Ron Warmington had a face-to-face meeting with Ms Vennells and the Post Office’s £100,000-a-year chairman, Alice Perkins, wife of former Labour minister Jack Straw.

The Mail understands that after asking both women twice if they were really committed to finding the truth, they replied they were.

Mr Warmington told the Mail: ‘But as soon as we started discovering stuff, the howitzers were brought in and shells were being fired across at us. The Post Office tried to discredit us. Everything they did was underhand, unscrupulous, amateurish trickery.’

A source close to the audit admitted shock at the number of errors being made within the company.

‘I remember thinking they’d be better off making decisions with a dart board because they were getting everything wrong all the time,’ the source said.

‘They couldn’t even get post codes right on some outgoing letters. And there were thousands of documents which had misspelled Paula Vennells’ name.’

As for Ms Vennells herself, the source found her to be ‘dim’ and ‘over-promoted’ and ‘like dealing with a mosquito’.

‘If you’re going to take that top job with the bucks that go with it, you’d better be as sharp as a tack. And she wasn’t.’

Second Sight’s final report described the Horizon system as ‘not fit for purpose’ and warned of ‘potential miscarriages of justice and misconduct by prosecutors acting on behalf of the Post Office’.

But the Post Office insisted that there was ‘absolutely no evidence of any systematic issues with the computer system’.

Ms Vennells left the Post Office in 2019, months before a damning High Court judgment ruled that Horizon was not ‘remotely robust’ and had ‘bugs, errors and defects’.

This is what happened to Vennells after leaving the Post Office in 2019:

… as well as taking jobs as a non-executive director of Morrisons supermarket and retailer Dunelm – which brought in £140,000 a year – Ms Vennells was appointed as an adviser to the Cabinet Office, made a member of the Church of England ethical investments committee and became chairman of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, a paid post.

She was even being considered for the role of Bishop of London, one of the most high-ranking positions in the Church of England.

One of the most disturbing aspects of this story is how those in authority continued to promote her despite the very visible chaos left in her wake.

The Mail interviewed one person who said that attempting to block a Vennells appointment resulted in thinly-veiled threats of a career limiting nature:

An NHS whistleblower, retired consultant psychiatrist Dr Minh Alexander, told the Mail she wrote to the NHS Trust and Care Quality Commission in 2020 to question whether Ms Vennells was a ‘fit and proper person’ to become chairman in light of what had happened at the Post Office …

She was stunned to receive a lengthy ‘private’ email from former BBC Crimewatch presenter Nick Ross, who at the time was a non-executive board member at the trust, telling her: ‘I truly fear you may come to regret your attempts to have Paula Vennells sacked from her existing roles,’ and adding: ‘I worry that, for the best of intentions, you are pursuing a vendetta that may backfire on you.’

Good grief.

However, right prevailed in the end. In early 2021:

Two months after that December 2020 email exchange, Ms Vennells stood down. In April 2021, following the quashing of 39 sub-postmasters convictions, she resigned as an Anglican priest and from her Morrisons and Dunelm directorships. She also stepped down as governor of private Bedford School, where her two sons were educated.

I read elsewhere that she had to be told to resign her sacerdotal duties; she did not go voluntarily.

I know. You’re wondering about Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury. We’re nearly there.

On January 9, The Telegraph told us:

It also emerged that in 2017 she was considered for the role of Bishop of London.

On Monday, January 15, The Telegraph featured this story, ‘Justin Welby should quit for supporting Paula Vennells to be Bishop of London’:

Queen Elizabeth II’s former chaplain has called for the Archbishop of Canterbury to stand down amid suggestions he endorsed the disgraced former Post Office boss to be Bishop of London …

Last week it emerged Ms Vennells was shortlisted to become Bishop of London in 2017 – the third most senior role in the Church of England after the Archbishops of Canterbury and York – despite suggestions having emerged at the time that postmasters had been wrongly prosecuted.

Church sources claim the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, was personally supportive of Ms Vennells’ candidacy at the time.

In the wake of the news, the late Queen’s former chaplain, the Rev Canon Jeremy Haselock, who is an associate priest at Great St Bartholomew’s in the City of London, criticised the Archbishop’s reported endorsement of Ms Vennells, saying: “Welby must go.”

The Revd Canon Haselock has a damning indictment of the Archbishop:

Writing on his personal Facebook account hours after the story broke, accompanied by a picture of the Archbishop and Ms Vennells, he said: “Surely this is the point at which Welby must go. Another demonstration of his complete lack of sound judgment.”

In the post, seen by The Telegraph, he added: “His backing for this woman for episcopal office shows how completely he fails to understand the nature of that office.

“His total failure to bring pastoral care to the fore during the pandemic and the disastrous decisions he made at that time shows his complete and utter lack of understanding of the Church and its ministry.

“His has been a terrible primacy and clutching his GCVO [Royal Victorian Order] he should go.”

Rev Canon Jeremy Haselock was appointed Chaplain to Her Majesty the Queen in 2013, a title which he held until 2021, ministering to the late monarch …

The article continues with more about the eventual nomination of the current Bishop of London:

The Daily Telegraph understands that alongside Ms Vennells, other names considered for the role were the Rt Rev Christopher Cocksworth, the former Bishop of Coventry who is now the Dean of Windsor, and Rt Rev Dr Graham Tomlin, the former Bishop of Kensington amd the current director of the Centre for Cultural Witness at Lambeth Palace.

Dame Sarah Mullally DBE was eventually appointed the 133rd Bishop of London in December 2017.

As for Vennells:

“I have heard that Welby pushed for her,” one [Church source] said. “Apparently the meeting of the Crown Nominations Committee in 2017 was quite fortuitous because Paula had no parish experience and was a self-supporting minister.

How on earth could he want to appoint a Bishop of London with no parish experience?

The paper quoted their source as saying:

Over the past 10 years the church has become more of a business model so the whole idea of Paula Vennells being the supposed favourite candidate of Justin Welby links to the whole businessification of the church under his reign.

Oh, dear.

A second Church source spoke to The Telegraph:

Another source said the Archbishop was known to be supportive of Ms Vennells, who sat on the church’s Ethical Investments Advisory Group.

“Justin was close to her,” they said. “He was always very supportive of her when she was a member of the Church of England ethical investment advisory committee.”

Not surprisingly:

Lambeth Palace declined to comment.

I realise that the Church of England encourages men and women with previous careers to seek ordination. Welby himself was a highly-paid Shell executive. On the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with that.

However, that does not excuse and should not encourage the wrong type of people being given preferment either for ordination or subsequent senior positions that they do not deserve.

I agree that Justin Welby should stand down as Archbishop of Canterbury, but who would succeed him?

It will be interesting to see if this story gathers pace in the coming weeks. More about the Post Office scandal emerges every day, and Paula Vennells’s fingerprints are on a significant portion of it.

Lessons from the Roman Empire

On January 2, 2024, the Daily Sceptic featured a post, ‘What Ancient Rome Can Teach Our Fearful Age’.

Guy de la Bédoyère recaps the four centuries after the birth of Christ in the empire. Most of us will know the main events that led to its downfall, including vice and corruption.

However, there are also other elements to explore.

Crime

Even in the decades following St Paul’s death, crime was a preoccupation with Romans. One of them was spiking with poisoned needles (emphases mine):

During the reign of Domitian (81-96) there had been an outbreak of a sinister new offence, not only in Rome but also elsewhere. The perpetrators’ modus operandi was to spread poison on needles and then prick anyone they could with them. This extraordinary story of the original spikers sounds like something from the Sherlock Holmes stories, but Rome had no celebrated sleuth, fictional or otherwise, to solve the crimes. The result was that many victims died, most of them unaware of what had happened to them.

Some of the needle killers were informed on, caught and punished. The mystery is what the motive was. The historian Dio, who recorded the outbreak, suggests it was some sort of crooked business, but there is no suggestion that the murderers were after money. The wave may have been driven by nothing more than a malicious desire to spread panic. If so, it succeeded.

There was already a lot of crime in Rome by then that made the capital sound like an early version of New York City. The poet Juvenal wrote:

When your house is closed, and your shop locked up with bar and chain, and everything is quiet you’ll be robbed by a burglar, or perhaps a cut-throat will wipe you out quickly with his blade.

Oddly enough, the upper classes comprised the greatest number of brigands:

Lethal violence could erupt without warning, to say nothing of the Roman habit of hurling broken pots out of the window. Oddly, the available evidence suggests that much the most dangerous cutthroats were often young men from aristocratic families.

Juvenal said that there were so many such hazards in Rome that anyone who went out to dinner without making a will first was guilty of sheer negligence. The poet Horace mentioned how easy it was to be taken for a fool by a beggar loitering at any one of Rome’s numerous road junctions pretending to be lame.

Weather

Weather also created a climate of panic:

Pliny the Younger, wrote to a friend after experiencing a terrible storm. “Here [in Rome] we have incessant gales and repeated floods. The Tiber had burst its banks and wrecked homes and many people injured and killed.”

Pliny the Younger finished up, “When disaster is actual or expected, the effect is much the same, except that suffering has its limits but apprehension has none. Suffering is confined to the known event, but apprehension extends to every possibility.”

Here is the lesson for us:

He couldn’t have described the fear and despair promoted at every opportunity in our own time better. The only difference is that now it’s turned into an industry.

Migration

However, what the article did not explore were the reasons for the Western Roman Empire’s decline in the fifth century.

History tells us that Rome depended increasingly on foreign imports into its military, men who did not necessarily share Roman values:

For most of its history, Rome’s military was the envy of the ancient world. But during the decline, the makeup of the once mighty legions began to change. Unable to recruit enough soldiers from the Roman citizenry, emperors like Diocletian and Constantine began hiring foreign mercenaries to prop up their armies. The ranks of the legions eventually swelled with Germanic Goths and other barbarians, so much so that Romans began using the Latin word “barbarus” in place of “soldier.”

While these Germanic soldiers of fortune proved to be fierce warriors, they also had little or no loyalty to the empire, and their power-hungry officers often turned against their Roman employers. In fact, many of the barbarians who sacked the city of Rome and brought down the Western Empire had earned their military stripes while serving in the Roman legions.

This is how it happened:

The Barbarian attacks on Rome partially stemmed from a mass migration caused by the Huns’ invasion of Europe in the late fourth century. When these Eurasian warriors rampaged through northern Europe, they drove many Germanic tribes to the borders of the Roman Empire. The Romans grudgingly allowed members of the Visigoth tribe to cross south of the Danube and into the safety of Roman territory, but they treated them with extreme cruelty.

According to the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman officials even forced the starving Goths to trade their children into slavery in exchange for dog meat. In brutalizing the Goths, the Romans created a dangerous enemy within their own borders. When the oppression became too much to bear, the Goths rose up in revolt and eventually routed a Roman army and killed the Eastern Emperor Valens during the Battle of Adrianople in A.D. 378. The shocked Romans negotiated a flimsy peace with the barbarians, but the truce unraveled in 410, when the Goth King Alaric moved west and sacked Rome. With the Western Empire weakened, Germanic tribes like the Vandals and the Saxons were able to surge across its borders and occupy Britain, Spain and North Africa.

A Free Library review of Oxford historian Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire provides more detail, which also involves food security. While crops failed in what we know of as today’s Italy, further-flung areas of the empire saw much better crop production. The hordes eventually took advantage of this situation:

Some historians have argued … that this was actually a time when agriculture in important areas of the empire, especially in Italy, was failing. To make this claim they point to the fact that tremendous amounts of agricultural produce were brought to Rome from the empire’s North African provinces, rather than grown locally. Moreover, it is historical orthodoxy to hold that the later empire overtaxed its land-owning class, causing a flight from the land that resulted in the infamous Agri Deserti, the phenomenon of the “deserted lands.”

This phenomenon no doubt did occur in some areas. Ancient texts make reference to it, and historians were quick, too quick it seems, to assume this applied to the empire as a whole. Heather cites archaeological evidence to the contrary. Some areas, he points out, experienced rapid and intense agricultural and rural growth. In Roman North Africa, Greece, the Near East and elsewhere, agriculture flourished. In these areas, Heather writes, “the fourth and fifth centuries have emerged as a period of maximum rural development–not minimum, as the orthodoxy would have led us to expect.”

The economy of the Roman Empire was grounded in agriculture; the power of the state, militarily, reflected this economy. If the agricultural sector was strong, the state’s coffers would be full, and the military, largely the only full-scale service provided by the Roman State, would be correspondingly strong. In fact, the military of the Roman Empire in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, just when it was supposedly on the decline according to orthodox historical interpretation, was in reality near its zenith.

It is worth noting that:

at the beginning of the fourth century, at the end of the reign of the Emperor Diocletian, the Romans could field an army of at least 300,000 men. Moreover, this was a well-trained army that could fight a two-front war, and it did so not long after, against the Goths in the West and the Persians in the East.

When the Goths arrived at Rome, although they were mistreated, the Romans needed the manpower:

In a sense, their timing was perfect. The Romans were deeply embroiled in the East with a resurgent Persian empire. The Balkans were, therefore, a bit short on manpower. Under the circumstances, the Emperor Valens was forced to admit the Gothic horde.

However, food security caused an internal war:

All went well until food supplies ran short and tempers flared. There was an attack on the emperor at a banquet and soon there was war, which raged for six years.

From the time of this conflict, known as the Gothic War, until the fall of the Roman Empire, continuous pressure from the Huns would force other barbarians to move en masse across the Western Empire. Throughout the book, Heather examines the empire’s continuing attempts to repel or at least contain the onslaught. More often than not, they were successful in battle, but each success (and sometimes spectacular failure) sapped the strength of the giant. Soon Gaul was overrun, and Spain, too.

Eventually, the hordes invaded North Africa, the empire’s breadbasket:

The real blow came when Goths and Vandals crossed into North Africa and took over the Roman provinces there. Loss of these provinces would mean loss of the West, and the combined forces of all the empire were sent to recover the area. Just before making landfall near Carthage, the Roman fleet was trapped and destroyed by a Vandal fleet.

Conclusions

The Free Library‘s review comes to these conclusions from Peter Heather’s book:

There are two major lessons to be learned from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, and these are made apparent in Heather’s book. First and foremost is the danger of uncontrolled hostile immigration. That the empire could absorb large groups of immigrants is beyond doubt. It could and did do so over several centuries. But even the Roman Empire, with its vast territory and unprecedented wealth, had a limit to the number of people it could absorb and Romanize.

Eventually, the immigrants grew more powerful than the existing Roman authority and, maintaining to some degree their independence of spirit and character, were unwilling to relinquish their own culture and adopt the Roman. Vast blocs of once-Roman territory eventually became foreign and even the preexisting Roman population, eventually outnumbered, had to make peace with the newcomers.

As for Christianity being to blame, as Edward Gibbon wrote in the 18th century:

it has been the norm to see in the fall of the empire the supposedly pernicious role of the new Christian religion. Heather’s book, taken as a whole, is a marvelous corrective for this mistaken position. There can be no doubt, after reading Heather, that the West, at the height of its power, succumbed to successive waves of hostile immigrants.

Heather also makes the point that if Christianity were to blame, then the empire in the East, based at Constantinople, should not have continued for almost a millennium after the fall of the West. After all, the Eastern Empire was just as Christian as the West, and was even closer to the scene of the many early doctrinal controversies. And yet the sun did not set on the Eastern Empire of the Romans until 1453.

Lessons for us

We are seeing parallels to empathetic immigration in all Western countries, including Australia, as Patrick Christys featured on his GB News programme on Thursday, January 5:

Christys’s intro is about the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has just come into an inheritance of £2.4m from his late mother’s estate. As Britons know, Archbishop Welby wants compassion to be extended to all coming across the Channel in small boats. Christys suggests that Welby use his inheritance to personally house these economic migrants, known for tossing their papers and mobile phones overboard into the Channel before arriving on our shores.

At the 20:00 point, Christys interviews The Spectator Australia‘s Alexandra Marshall who wonders why immigrants are occupying such a large swathe of the nation’s cities and nearby suburbs while indigenous Australians have been pushed out to the exurbs in the past decade. Alexandra Marshall knows, because she lives in a nearby suburb of Sydney in a largely immigrant neighbourhood. An associate professor at the University of Queensland, Dr Dorina Pojani, said that it was because of the pandemic. Marshall counters that she herself had been living in that neighbourhood for several years before the pandemic and saw it change. She also does not think that Australians who have lived all their lives near Sydney should be priced out of the housing market.

Pojani brushed away Marshall’s experience in a rather dismissive tone. It should be noted that Dr Pojani is Albanian and, interestingly enough, lectures on Urban Planning.

Hmm.

Food for thought.

The Very Revd Trevor Beeson would have made a great Archbishop of Canterbury

Over the past few weeks, I have read the Telegraph‘s obituary of the Very Reverend Trevor Beeson, a former Dean of Winchester, several times.

It occurs to me that he would have made a fine Archbishop of Canterbury. Sadly, his name was never in the frame.

Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

Early years

Trevor Beeson was born on March 2, 1926:

The son of a grocer, Trevor Randall Beeson was born on St Chad’s Day, March 2 1926, and educated locally at Gedling, Nottinghamshire. There, in 1950, he married Josephine Cope, the daughter of the local butcher. Thus, as Beeson often remarked, the family was assured of meat and two veg for Sunday lunch.

Beeson grew up in the days where one could leave school and still have good career prospects:

He left school aged 14 and went to work as a clerk in a Nottingham firm of accountants.

The Second World War was just beginning at that time, and Beeson began tracking Royal Air Force (RAF) activities:

… he started keeping a diary recording the aircraft losses on both sides during the Battle of Britain, and he applied to the Air Ministry to join the RAF as soon as he was old enough.

At the age of 18, he was called up to the RAF:

… a wartime shortage of bank staff saw him move, at the age of 16, to employment as a counter clerk with the Westminster Bank. He was eventually called up to the RAF in 1944, serving as ground crew at Bomber Command airfields in Lincolnshire. When the war ended, he was posted to the RAF meteorological office, flying out of Gibraltar as a weather observer in converted Halifax Bombers. He was fortunate to survive the occasion his plane ditched in the Mediterranean.

While he was in the RAF, he felt the call to ministry:

During his time in the RAF, Beeson made his first visit to Westminster Abbey, which impressed him by the splendour of its evensong and the grime of its interior. He resolved to take Holy Orders and, on demobilisation, he went immediately to train for the priesthood at King’s College, London, and St Boniface, Warminster.

Newly married in 1950 and newly ordained in 1951, Beeson took up his first two assignments in the northeast of England, where he upset some of the residents:

… he spent three years as a curate at Leadgate, Co Durham, then was given a new parish on a seedy Stockton-on-Tees housing estate. There, with characteristic energy and good intentions, he demonstrated his go-ahead qualities by inviting parishioners to a bottle party. This attracted 200 bottles (to be sold for parish funds) and a protest from the pulpit by the president of the local Free Church Council. Beeson later upset his parishioners by offering to attend a Roman Catholic Mass.

Journalism career

The postwar years were a time of new trends in the Anglican Church. One of these was the Parish and People movement.

Beeson was involved in that and began editing one of its magazines. From there, more journalism assignments followed, including television. Beeson continued his ministry throughout with greater church postings during the decades that followed:

His skill in editing a magazine for the “Parish and People” movement led to him being invited by the future Reverend Lord Beaumont of Whitley to edit The New Christian, a fortnightly emulating the style of the political weeklies. To enable him to pursue his writing more easily Beeson was made a curate at St Martin-in-the-Fields and in 1971 Vicar of Ware, Hertfordshire, as a friend of Robert Runcie, the Bishop of St Albans.

He became a columnist for The Guardian and the Chicago-based Christian Century. His growing reputation as a journalist and writer led to the British Council of Churches commissioning him to write a book reporting and reflecting on material gathered by a team of experts about religious conditions in Russia and Eastern Europe. The resulting volume, Discretion and Valour, was published in 1974.

After his move to Westminster Abbey, Beeson undertook a similar task in partnership with Jenny Pearce at the Latin America Bureau in London. Dipping a sizeable big toe into the controversial waters of liberation theology, the book, A Vision of Hope (1984), describes the dangerous life and witness of Latin-American Christians who, in the face of oppressive regimes, took sides with the poor and gave a voice to the cry for justice and basic human rights.

Further output during his time in Westminster included the book Britain Today and Tomorrow (1978) and a television series, The Controversialists. He was also chairman of SCM Press for nine years.

Amazing.

Canon of Westminster Abbey

As a Canon of Westminster Abbey, he continued writing but had a full schedule with the various responsibilities at one of the world’s most famous houses of worship:

… he particularly relished the beauty of the liturgy and, as Treasurer, had his first taste of the desperate search for revenue experienced by all great churches in the late 20th century.

With a staff of 170, he had to accommodate not only worshippers but those who saw the Abbey as a national monument and foreign tourists who regarded it as a wondrous and incomprehensible spectacle.

Although Robert Runcie was one of his friends, he gave him a lukewarm endorsement as Archbishop of Canterbury:

Despite the ever-expanding workload there were times when he seemed a little too able to criticise colleagues, as when he rang up the BBC advising them to run an interview recorded some days earlier in which he said that Runcie, just named as Archbishop of Canterbury, was “the best of a mediocre bunch”.

He got that right.

Beeson also wrote a controversial book about his time at the Abbey, based on the diaries he kept:

In the excerpts from his diaries, published in Window on Westminster (1998), he wittily and deftly recorded not only the quarrels between his colleagues and a long-running boundary dispute with Westminster School but the quirkiness of everyday life at the Abbey. The first edition was hastily withdrawn and amended after a character featured in it, although unnamed, sued for libel. The case was settled out of court.

The obituary has more eye-opening vignettes from the book, but this one is just as relevant today as it would have been when it happened:

Beeson also described his capture of a man stealing his television. Marching the thief to a colleague’s house, he then went to the local police station, where he pointed out that he had been burgled three times in 10 months and had caught the miscreants twice – a better clear-up rate than the Metropolitan Police could boast.

Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons

In 1982, Beeson’s next assignment was that of Rector at St Margaret’s, the church next to the Abbey.

St Margaret’s hosts weekly church services for MPs and is considered the main house of worship for the House of Commons when it is in session.

In that post, Beeson became Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons. This was during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership and the Speaker at the time was Labour MP George Thomas. It is customary for the Speaker to be from the opposite party to the one in government at the time.

The Speaker’s Chaplain offers daily prayers in the Commons before each day’s session. These brief prayers are never televised or broadcast elsewhere.

During his time as Chaplain, Beeson was able to:

observe Margaret Thatcher at her shrillest in the chamber and at her most motherly and compassionate outside; to run a course on Liberation Theology for the Parliamentary Christian Wives Group; and to address the question of whether Jesus would vote Tory or Labour in the St Margaret’s Newsletter. He concluded that the parliamentary community was in many ways more charitable than some of his brethren in the Abbey.

When Mrs Thatcher nominated him for the Deanery of Winchester, she remarked that he would be free again from the restrictions imposed on his writing as Speaker’s Chaplain. In fact, there was so much work to be done at the Cathedral that he did not write another book until he retired 10 years later.

Dean of Winchester Cathedral — and Telegraph obituaries

We do not know too much about Beeson’s time as Dean of Winchester Cathedral in Hampshire, a post he took up in 1987.

What has appeared to be of greater interest is his time as an obituarist for The Telegraph under the leadership of the extraordinary journalist and bon viveur Hugh Massingberd. Massingberd transformed the style and content of The Telegraph‘s obituaries from the 1980s through to the present day. His 2007 obituary in The New York Times provides an example:

One Daily Telegraph obituary, from 1991, opened this way: “The Third Lord Moynihan, who has died in Manila, aged 55, provided through his character and career ample ammunition for critics of the hereditary principle. His chief occupations were bongo drummer, confidence trickster, brothel-keeper, drug-smuggler and police informer.”

Even then, Beeson was committed to his work at the cathedral. That said, his obituaries garnered an appreciative audience:

Beeson was a highly valued, amusing, judicious and punctual contributor, always prepared to rally round, though many a phone call had to end when it was time for Evensong. He often had to do his writing late into the night and, on one occasion, he came off a cricket pitch to produce a hasty piece on a bishop of Bermuda.

A Beeson obit was never sensationalised, but readers were left in no doubt that his subjects had a full set of strengths and weaknesses, which would occasionally be emphasised with a waspish turn of phrase. Bland phrases, such as “pastoral gifts” and “keen and determined intellect”, would hint whether a subject was short on theological interests or too intelligent to get on with colleagues.

Making attendance at daily worship his highest priority, he resolved to walk around the Cathedral in his cassock every day … Apart from the routine complications connected with general administration and the occasional distractions of a snuffling journalist or hedonistic television crew, there were decisions to be taken on floodlighting the Cathedral and the running of the bookshop.

To his credit, Beeson was not a man of the world, as was proven by what happened to him when professional fundraisers helped him at Winchester by sending him to a film premiere in London. The action-packed blockbuster films of the 1980s bewildered him:

When a serious financial problem was unexpectedly revealed, Beeson immediately recognised the need to employ professional fundraisers. Nevertheless he was distinctly uneasy about where the search for £7 million would lead. He found himself in a dinner jacket at a London film premiere introducing guests, whom he had never seen before, to the Duke and Duchess of York. The chosen film, Slipstream, was a space age adventure featuring a series of crashes which each time made the Duchess, sitting on his left, leap into the air.

“What the story was about I could not even begin to fathom,” Beeson recorded in his memoir, A Dean’s Diary (1997). “There seemed no thread of continuity; only a sequence of unrelated, albeit dramatic events. In desperation, I ventured to ask my right-hand neighbour, a small man, if he made anything of it. He assured me he did, which was perhaps not surprising for I learned later that he was Mark Hamill, the film’s leading actor. Since I had not been to the cinema for about a quarter of a century I came to the conclusion that film, as an art form, had advanced well beyond my comprehension.”

Beeson’s time at Winchester was not without controversy:

While taking a keen interest in beautifying his Cathedral there were rumbles of disapproval, which became serious on occasion. A proposal to commission new vestments and altar cloths from the Japanese Buddhist clothes designer Issey Miyake raised the spectre of costs of a colossal £2 million. The headline in a magazine, “The Cathedral of the Rising Sun”, soon stirred survivors of the Burma campaign to demonstrate that, although dismissed as “The Forgotten Army”, they had not forgotten the war.

A more serious problem exploded when Beeson agreed to a young people’s service with rock bands in the Cathedral, which was denounced in the Daily Mail as “a rave in the nave”. The Dean’s remark – “The main thing is that the young people have a good time” – drove the journalist Paul Johnson [a devout, traditional Catholic] to apocalyptic prose that was not to be assuaged by Beeson’s belief that the event was “no more than an updated version of the old diocesan youth rally”.

The reaction to the ‘rave in the nave’ caused Beeson’s health to suffer:

As hundreds of enraged letters poured in to the deanery, Hugh Massingberd, the obituaries editor of the Telegraph, eventually had to send Johnson the message that his articles were affecting Beeson’s work for the paper. The Dean was taking a break from work on his doctor’s advice when the event finally took place.

In the end, the event was a damp squib:

The Mail’s headline was “No sex, no drugs, just rock’n’roll”, and the Telegraph reported one angry participant as saying: “It wasn’t anything like a rave. It was just full of born-again Christians. We’d have had more fun at McDonald’s.”

Beeson also supported the ordination of women, which also did not go down well in certain quarters:

Beeson approvingly witnessed the introduction of women priests despite his bishop’s disapproval and the resignation of the Vice-Dean …

Later years

Beeson retired from Winchester after nine years as the Cathedral’s dean. He and his wife moved to nearby Romsey:

in 1996 as his wife’s health seriously declined. But as well as maintaining a wide circle of friends, whom he visited regularly, he remained active in ministry, taking Sunday services in local churches past his 90th birthday.

He continued writing obituaries:

and in 2002 published Priests and Prelates: The Daily Telegraph Clerical Obituaries, which contained an ecumenical sprinkling of Methodists and Catholics as well as Anglicans. His skill as a writer of biographical sketches was also displayed in a series of popular volumes on Anglican bishops, deans and canons …

Trevor Beeson was appointed OBE in 1997, just before the death of his wife, Josephine. He was also awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of Southampton.

Conclusion

This is why I think he should have been an Archbishop of Canterbury:

Beeson reckoned that he had been fortunate to minister during some of the best years for the Church of England. In retirement he was not afraid to comment on what he saw as the increasingly bland and lacklustre leadership of the Church of England. When churches were ordered to close during the early months of Covid, Beeson said in a letter to The Times: “I find it deeply disturbing that the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, yielding to government pressure, have suspended until further notice the offering of public worship in the Church of England. This is unprecedented and was not considered necessary even in the darkest days of our national history.”

He also contributed to a debate in the media as to whether it was necessary to re-order ancient churches in order to accommodate demands for a built-in toilet. Beeson proffered a simple solution to alleviate the need: “Shorter sermons.”

My commiserations go to his and Josephine’s two daughters Jean and Catherine. May the Triune God grant them grace, peace and comfort in the months ahead.

Forbidden Bible Verses — 2 Timothy 3:10-13

The three-year Lectionary that many Catholics and Protestants hear in public worship gives us a great variety of Holy Scripture.

Yet, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

My series Forbidden Bible Verses — ones the Lectionary editors and their clergy omit — examines the passages we do not hear in church. These missing verses are also Essential Bible Verses, ones we should study with care and attention. Often, we find that they carry difficult messages and warnings.

Today’s reading is from the English Standard Version Anglicised (ESVUK) with commentary by Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.

2 Timothy 3:10-13

All Scripture Is Breathed Out by God

¹⁰ You, however, have followed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness, ¹¹ my persecutions and sufferings that happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium, and at Lystra—which persecutions I endured; yet from them all the Lord rescued me. ¹² Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, ¹³ while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.

————————————————————————————————————————

Last week’s post discussed a further condemnation of Paul concerning false teachers; they prey on the vulnerable and pretend to follow the faith, although they will be found out in the end, just as Jannes and Jambres, the magicians opposing Moses, were. Jannes and Jambres, ancient Jewish writings tell us, were responsible for the golden calf incident, and the Israelites killed them afterwards.

In 1 and 2 Timothy, Paul commands Timothy to get rid of the false teachers corrupting the church in Ephesus and the surrounding towns. Paul either senses or knows that Timothy is having a difficult time of it. The false teachers arose from the midst of the congregation, which probably makes it more difficult for Timothy to assert his authority.

Here, Paul appeals to his younger protégé. At this point, Paul was in his mid- to late 60s and Timothy was 30 years younger. They would have been working closely together in the ministry for around 15 years.

Paul says that Timothy has followed him throughout: the Apostle’s teaching, his conduct, his aim in life, his faith, his patience, his love and his steadfastness (verse 10). Paul truly practised what he preached.

Before analysing the verse, let us contrast Paul’s life with the life of those who profess to be Christians but are lacking in faith.

Matthew Henry’s commentary says that is because such people do not know or understand the word of God (emphases mine):

The more fully we know the doctrine of Christ and the apostles, the more closely we shall cleave to it; the reason why many sit loose to it is because they do not fully know it.

John MacArthur says the same thing:

Let me say again, there are a lot of pastors, there are a lot of Christian leaders, there are a lot of good Christian lay people in the church but there are not many warriors for the truth who guard right doctrine, who cry out for uncompromising holiness. They are few and far between, certainly in this generation. And yet the church desperately needs them if we are to pass on a legacy of truth and conviction to the generation to follow.

Moving on to an analysis of verse 10, Henry tells us:

Now what is it that Timothy had so fully known in Paul? 1. The doctrine that he preached. Paul kept back nothing from his hearers, but declared to them the whole counsel of God (Acts 20 27), so that if it were not their own fault they might fully know it. Timothy had a great advantage in being trained up under such a tutor, and being apprised of the doctrine he preached. 2. He had fully known his conversation: Thou hast fully know my doctrine, and manner of life; his manner of life was of a piece with his doctrine, and did not contradict it. He did not pull down by his living what he built up by his preaching. Those ministers are likely to do good, and leave lasting fruits of their labours, whose manner of life agrees with their doctrine; as, on the contrary, those cannot expect to profit the people at all that preach well and live ill. 3. Timothy fully knew what was the great thing that Paul had in view, both in his preaching and in his conversation: “Thou hast known my purpose, what I drive at, how far it is from any worldly, carnal, secular design, and how sincerely I aim at the glory of God and the good of the souls of men.” 4. Timothy fully knew Paul’s good character, which he might gather from his doctrine, manner of life, and purpose; for he gave proofs of his faith (that is, of his integrity and fidelity, or his faith in Christ, his faith concerning another world, by which Paul lived), his long-suffering towards the churches to which he preached and over which he presided, his charity towards all men, and his patience. These were graces that Paul was eminent for, and Timothy knew it.

MacArthur directs our attention to the words ‘you followed’ in that verse:

Now, the key thing that I want you to note there and underline, two words in verse 10, “you followed,” you followed. And I want to expand on that as the major concept and thrust in this particular text. Timothy had a tremendous spiritual example, the epitome of patterns to trace your life on was Timothy’s pattern, namely the apostle Paul. And as I said, uncompromising champions of the truth usually have learned that at the feet of a stalwart defender of the faith. That was Timothy’s case. Paul himself was the model. You followed, and then Paul lists all those things about himself that Timothy followed.

You patterned your life after me. You followed the – the demonstration of uncompromising loyalty that was true of my life and you set your life in that same pattern. You saw that I suffered and that didn’t deter me. You saw that I was persecuted and that didn’t deflect my goal. You saw that I made the commitment whatever the price. You have had that pattern for your pattern. And several times in 2 Timothy he says you’ve got to suffer like I suffered, you’ve got to endure like I endured, you have to expect persecution like I got it. That’s the pattern. You’ve seen it, you’ve followed it, you’ve traced your life on it. You know what it means to have a strong example …

… Paul says, “But you,” – and that’s in the emphatic position in the original language – “But you,” – on the other hand, in contrast to all the deceitful false teachers and wicked men – “you followed,” – and we’ll just put the word “me” in there to sum up everything Paul says in verses 10 and 11. You had a pattern to follow to make you different. “You” is emphatic, pointing out that Timothy has had a very distinct training.

Let me talk a little about the word “followed.” It’s very important. It’s not just a simple word that means to follow in – in some generic sense. It’s a rich word that has some profound insight, parakoloutheō literally is to follow alongside. That’s simply its literal meaning. But as you see how it’s used in ancient times, it begins to open up in incredible ways. For example, the Stoic philosophers used the word as a technical term for the relationship between a disciple and his master, a student and his teacher.

A very close relationship was expressed in this term. You followed not from afar, not at a distance, but you followed in an intimate relationship as a – as a master and a disciple are connected. Some have translated it, for example, like this: “to study at close quarters,” or “to carefully note with a view to reproducing,” or “to take as an example.” So let’s – let’s take that middle meaning and read it this way, “But you carefully noted my life with a view to reproducing it.” That’s the essence of the word. You patterned after me. You began to think like I think, talk like I talk, walk like I walk, react like I react. You patterned your life after me.

It was Paul the apostle and Timothy the disciple, Paul the father and Timothy the child, Paul the leader and Timothy the companion, Paul the head and Timothy the associate, Paul the leader and Timothy the follower, Paul the example and the friend. That’s the way it went. Timothy the submissive learner and servant. Timothy was ever at his side, always at his side learning, learning, learning to imbibe the spirit of an uncompromising defender of the faith.

There has never lived a greater defender of the faith than Paul. And Timothy had an inestimable privilege that none of us will ever have, to walk alongside that incredible man. The aorist tense is used here which sums – sums up all of Timothy’s experience. You followed. From the beginning of our time together to the present time you patterned your life after me.

And, beloved, I want you to know that that is part of the necessary ingredients in a person who is a champion of the faith. You look for someone who has had a pattern to follow like that. And this really summarizes the whole of Timothy’s experience. So much was Timothy in one sense a clone of the apostle Paul that in 1 Corinthians 4 – Paul, of course, is very upset with the Corinthian church and he says to them, “I exhort you therefore be imitators of me,” verse 16. You need to pattern your life after me. Then he says, “For this reason, because I want you to be like me I have sent to you Timothy.”

Our models, those we choose to follow in some way, affect our lives, too:

And let me say just in a general sense … I am absolutely convinced that this is a tremendously important point. We are all copiers, we are all mimics, we are all imitators. And who you pattern your life after is going to be who you turn out to be in great measure. You are marked by your models. You are marked by your mentors. You are marked by the patterns you choose to follow. Your heroes, your examples mark you.

That’s why I tell young people all the time, it’s so important whose ministry you sit under, what school you go to, particularly what seminary you go to because the people who influence your life will do that. They will mark you. They will mark you with their set of convictions, with their perceptions and perspectives. If Timothy is to be loyal and strong against apostasy, if he is to stand against heresy and all attacks on the church, then he is going to be able to do that if he has learned to do that by patterning his life after someone who is like that. That’s the challenge. And Paul is concerned with Timothy’s loyalty. And he is concerned that Timothy make the most of his privilege of having been patterned after the apostle Paul himself …

We will imitate somebody or somebodies. We might as well imitate people worthy to be imitated. It is not wrong to be a reproduction if you are a reproduction of the right person. And that was the case with Timothy. He had followed all those attributes of Paul. He was the pattern.

MacArthur then examines Paul’s list in verse 10:

Now, I want to talk a little bit about the word “my,” you have followed my teaching … You did what I did in this point, this point, this point, this point, this point …

Now, we could divide this list, Paul loves lists and every time you come across a list of Paul, it’s helpful if you can kind of divide it up and get the flow of his thought. And there are really three areas in this list that Paul covers. And he says you have followed me in all these three areas. The first one is ministry duty, ministry duty. And that’s the first place where you learn how to pattern your life after someone. How do they carry on their ministry? He divides his ministry duty into two things: teaching and conduct. You have followed my teaching, my conduct.

Teaching, didaskalia simply means what it says, doctrine, teaching, divine truth, the basis of everything. He says, Timothy, you followed my teaching of truth, you followed my instruction, God’s revelation. You followed apostolic doctrine, you followed my doctrine. In chapter 2 verse 2, “The things you heard from me in the presence of many witnesses you are to pass on to someone else.” You learned from me, someone else needs to learn from you. The passing on of the apostolic doctrine was vital.

… When he taught, he taught what Paul had taught him. That’s what he was to do. The things you heard from me, teach faithful men and so they’ll teach others also and will keep passing down the unmitigated, unaltered truth. That was absolutely vital …

Secondly, he followed Paul not only in teaching but in conduct. That word agōgē means manner of life, pattern of behavior, lifestyle. It’s a simple word used only here in the New Testament, but it has to do with your daily living. Now, what was wonderful about Paul, and this is a good – good thought to keep in mind. What was wonderful about Paul was that his doctrine was in perfect harmony with his living. And that has such tremendous integrity that it has an overwhelming impact on someone. When you live what you teach, you have a powerful influence. And here was a man who taught truth and lived truth consistently. That is great integrity. Timothy followed the pattern of ministry.

Now ministry in its simplest way can be described in these two things. Your ministry is what you teach and how you live. Those are the – those are the duties of ministry, to teach truth and live truth, to teach what is right and live what is right. And Timothy followed Paul. He knew the pattern of how to teach truth and how to live truth. Those basic duties of ministry Timothy followed. And those things are essential in the patterning process.

… What any of us in leadership communicate to people, first and foremost, is what we teach and the way we live. And if there is disparity and inconsistency, there is tremendous confusion and chaos. A loss of integrity is tragic. So the bottom-line ministerial duty, the bottom-line duty in spiritual mentoring – if we can use that term – is to make sure your teaching and your living are consistent. Paul did that in front of Timothy. Timothy was doing that in front of others.

… not only did Timothy follow the pattern of ministry duty but of … personal qualities. Look again at verse 10. He says, “You also followed my purpose, my faith, my patience, my love,” those four things. You followed in my purpose, my faith, my patience, my love. Those are personal character qualities. You patterned your life after me. Now, let me show you what he means by this. Purpose, that’s the first quality to start with, motive. What’s in your heart? What’s the purpose? Boy, I’m telling you, this is what dictates a man’s life. What is the driving passion of his heart? The word purpose means that. The inner motive, the driving passion, the consuming desire of his heart.

What was it for Paul? I’ll tell you what it was, 1 Corinthians chapter 9 verses 16 to 18, “Woe is unto me if I” – What? – “preach not the gospel.” Acts chapter 20. “I do not count my life dear unto myself, I want to finish the ministry Christ gave to me,” he says in Acts chapter 20. “I have not failed to declare unto you the whole counsel of God.” My hands, as it were, “are clean from any blood, I have discharged my responsibility to proclaim Christ, teach God’s Word” …

Now, this is the thing that I want you to understand. That is the driving force from within that creates a life of truth and duty. When you look at a person and you see great spiritual integrity, you see a person who teaches truth and lives truth, you can know they’re driven by a great internal purpose, to be – to be to the glory of God, the honor of God, to do the thing that God has gifted, called, commissioned them to do …

The second thing he mentions in verse 10 is faith, my faith. It could be that he means here faith in God. That would be certainly a fair translation of pistis. It could mean that. It also could mean faithfulness or trustworthiness. The same term would be translated that way. And, usually, in lists that Paul makes, like Galatians 5, the list there, 1 Timothy 2:15, 1 Timothy 4:12. In the list it seems best to translate it faithfulness. So he may be saying you have followed my consummate faith and trust in God or you have followed my faithfulness, loyalty, trustworthiness with regard to the truth.

In either case, what he is saying is I never compromised, I never wavered in my trust toward God and I never wavered in my loyalty to His Word and His calling. You followed my faith, you followed my faithfulness. That’s a tremendous thought. Faith begets faithfulness, if you really trust God you’ll be faithful to His Word and His will. He stayed true to the purpose. So he says you followed my purpose and that meant you followed my faith and faithfulness. You stayed true to it because you were driven by that purpose.

And even when things don’t go right, he says, you followed my patience, makrothumia. What is that? That is the spirit that endures persecution from people. The steadfast spirit that never gives up and never gives in. It means patience with people, even persecuting people. So he says, “Timothy, you followed my purpose, that resolute uncompromising devotion to do the duty God had given you, to preach Christ, exalt His name, extend His Kingdom with no thought for comfort, no thought for personal success. You did it; you were committed to doing it. Your faith never wavered, your faithfulness and loyalty was exemplary. And even when persecution came you endured that, you took it. You were patient with people, even to people who persecuted you.

Then he adds a fourth characteristic, my love you followed. You loved, you loved God in it all, you never lost your love for Him. You loved the church. That’s why you were willing to do it. And you loved the lost and you loved even your enemies who persecuted you. We can take love and stretch it at the most magnanimous point here. The agape volitional love of Paul was evident in every dimension. He loved God unwaveringly. He loved the world so much that his heart broke when he saw a city given to idolatry. He loved the church so much that he gave his life on their behalf.

And he loved even his enemies, even his enemies to the point where his desire for those who persecuted him was salvation. He had love in its widest broadest sense. Now, do you see the flow of qualities? When a man has a driving purpose to fulfill God’s will he will be faithful to that purpose. Faithful to that purpose even though he is persecuted and hated by those around him. And even though being persecuted and hated, never moves away from loving God, loving the church, loving the lost and loving even the persecutors. Virtue upon virtue marks out the greatness of the heart of Paul. And Timothy followed that. He patterned his life after that.

Paul reminds Timothy that he followed the Apostle throughout his persecutions in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, all of which he endured and from which God rescued him (verse 11).

Henry explains Paul’s message in that verse:

5. He knew that he had suffered ill for doing well (v. 11): “Thou hast fully known the persecutions and afflictions that came unto me” (he mentions those only which happened to him while Timothy was with him, at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra); “and therefore let it be no surprise to thee if thou suffer hard things, it is no more than I have endured before.” 6. He knew what care God had taken of him: Notwithstanding out of them all the Lord delivered me; as he never failed his cause, so his God never failed him. Thou hast fully known my afflictions. When we know the afflictions of good people but in part, they are a temptation to us to decline that cause which they suffer for; when we know only the hardships they undergo for Christ, we may be ready to say, “We will renounce that cause that is likely to cost us so dear in the owning of it;” but when we fully know the afflictions, not only how they suffer, but how they are supported and comforted under their sufferings, then, instead of being discouraged, we shall be animated by them …

MacArthur has more, picking up from ‘steadfastness’ or ‘perseverance’ at the end of verse 10:

Now Paul went through some very difficult experiences and Timothy understood that. He saw that. He learned from that. He benefited from that. The word “perseverance,” hupomonē, means patience with circumstances, not patience with people like the other word, makrothumia, but patience with circumstances …

… People can’t take it away, circumstances can’t take it away, it’s resolute, persevering, enduring. Timothy caught that virtue. He patterned his life after that. He learned that ability to endure negative circumstances, to live under it no matter how difficult. And he learned it from Paul.

And then he says you also followed my persecutions. That word, diōgmos from diōkō, to pursue, means persecution. This is defined here as pursuit, people who wanted his life, plots. He says in Acts 20 the Jews were always lying in wait to kill him, plotting against him, plot after plot after plot to take the life of the apostle Paul. It was a way of life, absolutely constant persecution …

… So he says you were there during my difficult experiences. You’ve learned from me ministry duty. You’ve learned from me personal quality. You’ve learned from me difficult circumstances and how to face them. And then he adds the word “my sufferings.” Sometimes the persecution actually became suffering. That was routine for Paul. The word used here has in it the root of the idea of pathos, suffering, sorrow. Sometimes Paul really got it. It wasn’t just persecution coming at him, it hit him. It hit him and it hit him hard. He suffered in his own body, “I bear in my body the marks of Christ,” he said. It happened not just once but a myriad of times …

So Paul reminds Timothy of sufferings and says, “Timothy, you know, you’ve been there, you’ve endured them, you’ve learned how to handle them with me.” So he says you have followed, in verse 11, all of these ending up with persecutions and sufferings such has happened to me. And then he reaches back at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra.

Why? Let me tell you something. Why does he go back there? Because those three cities were in the province of Galatia and that was Timothy’s home province. Lystra was Timothy’s hometown. Now, that is also the first place where there was recorded hostility against Paul, so he’s simply going back to the beginning. And he says, “Such has happened to me at Antioch, Iconium and Lystra.” And that’s where the persecution began, on his first missionary journey, that’s the first record of persecutions coming against the apostle Paul.

In Acts 13 – look at it for just a moment – we’ll see a little bit of insight, tremendous insight into what happened. It says in verse 14 that they arrived at Antioch and “on the Sabbath day went to the synagogue, sat down after the reading of the law and the prophets, the synagogue official sent to them saying, ‘Brethren, if you have any word of exhortation for the people, say it.’”

So here is Paul, he’s a guest in the synagogue. He’s obviously a teacher from the Jews. So they read the Scripture and they say, all right, we’ve got a guest rabbi, you stand up, you have something to say, say it. So he stands up and says what he has to say and what he has to say is about the Messiah Jesus. And so here he is in a Jewish synagogue preaching the gospel. And what happens as a result? Verse 42. “Paul and Barnabas were going out, the people kept begging these things might be spoken to them the next Sabbath. And when the meeting of the synagogue had broken up, many of the Jews and the God-fearing proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas who speaking to them were urging them to continue in the grace of God.

“And the next Sabbath nearly the whole city assembled to hear the Word of God but when the Jews saw the crowds they were filled with jealousy, began contradicting the things spoken by Paul and they were blaspheming.” Drop down to verse 50, “The Jews aroused the devout women of prominence and the leading men of the city and instigated a persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and drove them out of their district.”

Now this was the beginning. This was in Galatia, the province where Timothy’s hometown existed. So Timothy knew about this. This is way back to the early days, to the very spiritual roots of Timothy in terms of his experience with Paul. Then Paul went to Iconium, chapter 14 says, they came into Iconium, they entered the synagogue of the Jews together, spoke in such a manner that a great multitude believed, both of Jews and of Greeks. But the Jews who disbelieved stirred up the minds of the Gentiles and embittered them against the brethren. And again you have this tremendous hostility. Verse 5, an attempt was made by the Gentiles and the Jews with their rulers to mistreat and stone them.

So they couldn’t stay in Antioch and now they can’t stay in Iconium, so they head to Lystra. They come to Lystra in verse 8. Paul heals a man there, a miraculous healing of a cripple. The people don’t like that. The response to that is that they stone Paul, verse 19, drag him out of the city supposing that he is dead, they throw him on the dump heap in Lystra. Now that, no doubt, was Timothy’s first meeting with Paul. He sees him heal this man. He hears him preach. He sees him stoned and thrown on the dump. Tremendously powerful impressions on young Timothy.

This is his first understanding of Paul. Now even though these events happened before Paul takes Timothy with him, before chapter 16 where Paul links up with Timothy, certainly Timothy was aware of these events. If for no other reason Paul no doubt filled him in on all the details. So Timothy’s first impression of Paul was as a man of tremendous courage, a man of tremendous resolution, uncompromising character who would give his life in the proclamation of the gospel.

That was Timothy’s first impression of Paul. What a tremendous legacy. What a tremendous legacy. He – he experienced Paul’s first sufferings vicariously and must have thought, “What a man. What an incredible man. What a strong man. What a courageous man!” And it’s Paul’s way of saying, “Timothy, you remember when in Lystra I was stoned. You can recall the kind of suffering I experienced from the start of your Christian life. You know what it’s been like all along and you’ve learned how to respond to that. You followed that kind of pattern. You know what it is to be courageous” …

And Timothy was there in some of them and vicariously there in all of them. So Paul reminds him of that. And then I love the way he closes, verse 11, “And out of them all the Lord delivered me.” Out of them all the Lord delivered me. You know that, too, Timothy. You know the Lord preserved me out of them all. And he quotes really from Psalm 34:19. That’s again his Old Testament background leaking through. Psalm 34:19, “But many are the afflictions of the righteous but the Lord delivers him out of them all.” He almost quotes it verbatim. The Lord delivered him out of all of his trials, but isn’t that what God promised to do? …

… That word delivered means to drag or rescue. God provided the rescue. So what is Paul saying? He’s saying, “Timothy, you have had a pattern to follow. You have a strong mentor relationship. You know the quality of life it takes. You know the ministry duties required. You know the inevitability of spiritual persecution and difficulty. You have had the ingredients to be a strong, strong defender of the faith.”

Paul goes on to say, prefacing his next statement with the word ‘Indeed’ — in other words, it’s a certainty — that all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted (verse 12). And, at that time, instructions had been sent from Rome throughout the empire that Christians were persona non grata. Because Christians believe that all are equal in Christ Jesus, the Romans feared a slave rebellion, the slaves outnumbering their masters. As such, Paul, having evangelised so extensively throughout the empire, was the authorities’ top target.

Henry says that persecution comes to the faithful in greater or lesser degrees:

… not always alike; at that time those who professed the faith of Christ were more exposed to persecution than at other times; but at all times, more or less, those who will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. They must expect to be despised, and that their religion will stand in the way of their preferment; those who will live godly must expect it, especially those who will live godly in Christ Jesus, that is, according to the strict rules of the Christian religion, those who will wear the livery and bear the name of the crucified Redeemer. All who will show their religion in their conversation, who will not only be godly, but live godly, let them expect persecution, especially when they are resolute in it.

MacArthur tells us:

Now, let me take that statement apart for just a moment. All will be persecuted. All Christians? No, not all Christians, all who desire to live godly. If you’re a disobedient, weak, uninvolved, unconcerned, apathetic, inconsequential Christian, you may never be persecuted. You’re not a problem. Satan’s not going to waste his time with you; you’re not doing anything. But if you desire to live godly, the “who desire” there is literally a participle, the willing ones, the ones willing to live godly. Not that you’re going to be perfect but that’s your cry, that’s your desire. If you desire to live godly, you’re going to get persecuted …

And by the way, if all you want is to be godly and you’re not concerned about Jesus Christ, you may never get persecuted either because you’re no threat to the system. You’re in the system. Yours is paganism. And paganism doesn’t persecute paganism usually, although sometimes the demons get a bit confused about that. But the point is, “all” qualifies itself, “who desires to live godly,” qualifies itself, “in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution.” Because when you desire to live godly by virtue of your union with Christ Jesus, then you are a threat to the system and you are a threat to the kingdom of darkness and you will be persecuted. That’s a future passive, you will be persecuted. That’s a guarantee, that’s a promise.

So if you look at your life and you’re not having a lot of persecution, maybe you haven’t got a compassion for being godly. Maybe you’re not desiring to be godly or maybe you’re not in Christ Jesus. Now it doesn’t mean you’re going to be persecuted all the time at the maximum level. There will be varying times and seasons and varying degrees of persecution. But anyone who seeks to confront an ungodly society with a godly life in Christ Jesus is going to get some negative reaction. There will be hostility.

Jesus said in John 15, “If they hated Me they’ll hate you. In this world you shall have tribulation. Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” The Sermon on the Mount, all the way back when Jesus was first articulating the principles of salvation, “Blessed are you when men cast insults at you, persecute you, say all kinds of evil against you falsely on account of me, rejoice and be glad for your reward in heaven is great for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

Count it a joy to be persecuted. They put you in good company. And the world will react to a godly life. They have to. The persecution is going to come, Timothy, he says. You ought to be ready for it. You’ve had a pattern to follow, you know how to handle it. It’s going to come on you and it’s going to come on everybody who seeks to live godly in Christ Jesus during these last days.

Paul says that, while godly Christians are being persecuted, evil people and impostors go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived (verse 13).

Henry says:

Observe, As good men, by the grace of God, grow better and better, so bad men, through the subtlety of Satan and the power of their own corruptions, grow worse and worse. The way of sin is down-hill; for such proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. Those who deceive others do but deceive themselves; those who draw others into error run themselves into more and more mistakes, and they will find it so at last, to their cost.

MacArthur says that Paul is referring to the false teachers he discussed earlier in the chapter:

Verse 13, “Because evil men and impostor – impostors will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.” By the way, the evil men and impostors are the group described in verses 1 to 8. Verses 2 to 4 describes their evil. Verses 5 to 8 describes their impostoring. They are evil. That’s ponēros. It’s used of Satan in Matthew 13:19, they’re as malicious and wicked as he is. And then the second word translated here as “impostors” is translated many ways in Greek writing. Diviners, wizards, magicians, sorcerers, swindlers, cheaters. It refers to the crafty tricky deceitful people like Jannes and Jambres in verse 8, who tried to deceive the people with their tricks into believing that what Moses was doing was not of God.

These are the oppressors of the church. And because there will always be the wicked and the fakes and the frauds and the charlatans and the phonies and the swindlers, there’s always going to be the persecution. And it says – please note this – they proceed from bad to worse. They advance toward the worse. Verse 9 says their work doesn’t advance, it’s limited. It won’t progress where they’d like it to, God puts a boundary on their work. They’ll not destroy His work. But internally, they get worse and worse and their influence gets worse and worse.

MacArthur explains their moving from bad to worse:

Now, Bible scholars debate over this – this idea of proceeding from bad to worse. Does this mean the evil men and the impostors internally get worse and worse or does it mean that cumulatively their effect gets worse and worse? And I take it that the answer is yes to both of those. The future tense means that in the future they are going to degenerate internally and they’re going to have a degenerating deteriorating impact externally. Evil men get worse and worse and worse internally. Why? Because as they continue to live evil lives, the evil accumulating adds a degenerating element to their existence.

You know what I’m saying? A 20-year-old wicked seducer isn’t nearly as vile as a 70-year-old wicked seducer. Why? Because the constant compounding of that wickedness degenerates his own heart down, down and down. But on the outside, it is also true that the more wicked the men are, the more wicked the influence they have is. So there is an internal and an external accumulating vileness expressed here. And because men are getting more and more wicked, they’re getting more and more hostile. And because the environment is more and more influenced by their wickedness, the environment gets more and more hostile.

So the longer we go toward the Second Coming of Christ, the more the mystery of iniquity unfolds and the worse it gets. The godly are suffering through this church age and their suffering will escalate even until the terrible suffering that comes toward the end because evil men are getting worse internally and, collectively, their impact is worse externally. And then he says of them they are deceiving. That’s what they’re trying to do. Impostors misleading, deluding, leading people astray. And at the same time being deceived because their own sin, their own wretchedness blinds their own minds. Their own increasing evil makes them self-deceived and deceivers of others.

These are dangerous times, dangerous times. The closer we come to the time of our Lord’s return, the worse men get and the worse their influence … gets. And the accumulation of all the lies and false teaching mounts and escalates and we’re in dangerous times.

MacArthur preached that sermon in 1987, by the way: 36 years ago.

He concludes:

… dangerous times call for strong people. What kind of people is it going to take to stem the tide, to stand against it? Great champions for the truth. And what are the ingredients that make people strong?

First ingredient, they have strong mentors to follow as their spiritual models. And so what I can say to you as we draw this to a conclusion, beloved, is make sure that you’re patterning your life after spiritually strong people, who with uncompromising resolution stand as defenders of God’s truth. And some people will criticize you. In fact … they may criticize you somewhat relentlessly not only outside the church but even inside the church. But you know that the call of God is on the church to defend the faith, to guard the faith, to hold the treasure to pass it on to the next generation.

And we live in a day when the Church is sloppy in its self-defense, sloppy in its ability to stand against the tide of false teaching. It is not discerning. In some cases it doesn’t even care to be discerning. It just opens its mind to every kind of thing. And the church has a soft belly in which Satan can plunge the knife and bring about a severe wound. We need strong men, strong women who defend the faith who are discerning and resolute and uncompromising. And Paul says, “Timothy, you’ve got it going for you because you patterned your life after me.” What a tremendous privilege.

I write this post just days after YouGov took a poll of Anglican clergy for The Times. The former BBC presenter John Humphreys has more on the devastating findings of a group of notionally religious men and women called to defend the faith:

The survey uncovered high levels of stress among priests, many of whom feel over-stretched under the “pressure of justifying the Church of England’s position to increasingly secular and sceptical audiences”. They fear that the church’s efforts to arrest the decline in attendance will fail and this may ultimately lead to its “extinction”. Asked whether they think “Britain can or cannot be described as a Christian country”, only a quarter answered: “Yes”. Almost two thirds said Britain can be called Christian “but only historically, not currently”. The most glaring finding, according to The Times, is that is that “the foot soldiers” of the established religion believe that Christianity has been marginalised as a social force in this country.” Seven in ten believe that it’s a thing of the past.

This defeatism extends to the clergy’s individual working lives. Almost a quarter have considered quitting the priesthood because of overwork. Most are now faced with having to run more than one church, and some as many as ten. Disillusionment with a “remote church hierarchy” is widespread. Some priests described a “profound lack of support from their bishops.” There was a “strong desire” among the clergy for significant changes in church doctrine on issues such as sex, sexuality, marriage and the role of women to bring it into greater line with public opinion. Most priests want the church to start conducting same-sex weddings and drop its opposition to premarital and gay sex.

I have news for those priests. Paul’s epistles and the Book of Acts show time and time again that preaching about Jesus Christ was always difficult, even life threatening. Furthermore, Jesus Himself was hounded by His enemies throughout His three-year ministry, pursued unto death. What makes these priests think that their job should be easy? They are to defend the faith, not water it down to meet the world’s satisfaction. The Church is always opposed to the world. That is its holy purpose.

St Paul knew that. St Timothy knew that.

More importantly, Jesus told the disciples — and us — through the Gospels that this would be the case.

There is something deeply wrong with Anglican seminaries if they are teaching future priests and deacons that their road will be an easy one. It is not, not an easy road at all.

Next time — 2 Timothy 4:9-15

Why Theresa May entered politics

On August 26, 2023, The Times published an exclusive interview with former Prime Minister Theresa May, who still serves as the MP for Maidenhead.

Caroline Wheeler’s ‘Theresa May: Boris, Brexit and me’ reveals why the UK’s second female PM — all three have been Conservative! — entered politics (emphases mine):

May became the country’s second female prime minister when she entered Downing Street on July 13, 2016, in the wake of the Brexit vote and David Cameron’s resignation. She lasted three years, announcing her resignation in May 2019 after failing to get her Brexit deal through parliament and her party performing poorly in the European elections. She left office on July 24, succeeded by Boris Johnson, the nemesis who plotted her downfall.

The daughter of a vicar, she was 12 or 13 when she decided she wanted to go into politics. “I just woke up one day and thought, actually I’d like to be an MP. I think that being an MP can be as much a vocation as being a teacher and I suppose perhaps [that idea] had been generated by an upbringing of public service” …

May was born in Eastbourne, East Sussex, in 1956, the only child of Zaidee and Hubert Brasier, who was a Church of England vicar and the chaplain of a hospital. After studying at Holton Park Grammar School, which became the Wheatley Park comprehensive while she was there, May went on to study geography at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. She then worked at the Bank of England and the Association for Payment Clearing Services.

After two unsuccessful attempts to enter parliament, at 40 May became the Conservative MP for Maidenhead in 1997 as Tony Blair’s Labour Party swept to power. She spent much of the next 13 years on the shadow front bench. In 2010, when the coalition government won power, Cameron appointed her as his home secretary — only the second woman to hold that great office of state. She became the longest-serving home secretary in more than a century.

“They always say you had to be a communist in your youth, a socialist in your young adulthood and a Conservative as you got older,” she says. “I’ve always been a Conservative.” Her upbringing taught her the “importance of the freedom of individuals”. “It was the sense that, actually, how far you’re going in life is down to you. It’s about your talents and your willingness to work hard. To me the Conservative Party always provided the better environment in which people could succeed.” Her mother wanted her to be a nun. Did she ever entertain the idea? “No, absolutely not!”

One of May’s two heroes — the other being cricket legend Sir Geoffrey Boycott — is her father:

His absolute conviction was that he was there for everybody who lived in his parish; I’m there for everybody who lives in my constituency. To him it was regardless of whether they were coming to his church or not. For me it’s regardless of how somebody has voted. Once you’re in that position you’re there to support and help them, to work for them.

She says that the ministry and politics have their similarities:

Growing up as the daughter of a vicar, she says, isn’t so different from being the child of a politician. “There was a combination there of public service and public speaking. In the vicarage there was very much a sense that we were there for other people.”

Unfortunately, her parents died when she was in her 20s:

In 1981, a year after her marriage to Philip, her father was driving to a nearby church to conduct the Sunday evening service when he was in a collision with a Range Rover on the A40. He died of head and spine injuries. A few months later May’s mother, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, also died. At the age of 25 May was an orphan. “I suppose it made me even more want to do something that they would have been proud of. Even though they wouldn’t see it.”

Not many people know that May is also a foodie:

When I arrive at her house in the village of Sonning in her Maidenhead constituency, where she has lived for 27 years, May, 66, is in the kitchen discussing recipes with her aide. She has plucked one of hundreds of cookery books from her shelves and is leafing through it. In the centre of the sage-green room, which has large windows overlooking a well-kept garden, is a wooden table where we make ourselves comfortable. Philip, 65, a now-retired investment manager, pops his head round the door. The pair, who met at Oxford and have been married for 43 years, chat for a few moments, finishing each other’s sentences, before he scurries away to find a more private corner of the house.

Her food pleasure is a simple one:

her guilty pleasure is eating peanut butter straight from the jar.

She did not say whether she also has a bag of chocolate chips as a garnish.

May’s book about her political life will appear in September:

In the weeks after she left No 10, on a walking holiday in the Swiss Alps with her husband, Philip, May first had the idea for a book. It would pull together the threads of many issues she had dealt with, first as home secretary and then as PM. Out next month, it is called The Abuse of Power, a concept she defines as institutions of the state and those that work within them putting themselves first — way ahead of the people they are there to serve.

Personally, the way she handled Brexit was very poor indeed. She explains:

She voted to remain in the EU and now believes her life in Downing Street would have been easier if she had been a Brexiteer …

“I started off with the view that we had to find a way of doing Brexit that recognised the concerns of the 48 per cent who voted Remain,” she says. “It became this atmosphere of both Brexiteers and Remainers trying to get what was their absolute aim, rather than a compromise that would better suit everybody.”

That is where she went wrong. The 2019 chaos that ensued in Parliament was ruinous. Thank goodness that Boris Johnson won the leadership contest that summer after she stood down as Party leader.

Sadly, the pandemic loomed and even though we are officially out of the EU, we’re still deep in it. This summer, Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch refused to get rid of many of the EU laws still on our books. Rishi’s parlous Windsor Framework for Northern Ireland is worse than Boris’s equally parlous Protocol.

That said, at least Theresa May brought her parents’ example into politics: service to all her constituents.