Authority

 Hello All. Hope you are well. We are doing ok you know. HOH and I paid to go and look around the local tennis club gardens (see above) We are officially 100 years old and not bothered. We had lemon drizzle cake as well. 

Last night, we went to the pictures and saw Guardians of the Galaxy III. My review? Don't. I thought it was awful and I love a Marvel. It is dark and nasty. There are some horrible scenes involving animal scientific experiments but mainly it was just lazy rubbish. It's supposed to be a 12A but that just means that you can be 5 and go to see this film so long as your parents come with you. Blah.

We never watch Eurovision which I think puts us into a tiny minority. I genuinely don't understand it. I preferred it when it was Katy Boyle and you weren't allowed to use video effects and people just came on and sang a song. Now, I just find it annoying but everyone carries on as if I am the most anti-gay, anti-Ukraine miserable person in the world. People are very aggressive if you don't like it. 

We settled down instead to watch a DVD. (yes, it actually was a DVD). We watched Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery. This is one of my favourite films. It's feelgood and funny, Keaton looks great and New York looks even better. There is a school of thought now that says that you can't watch or read things produced by people with dark things in their past. Now, no one is going to be fighting in the streets to read Rolf Harris' Bumper Book of Painting or Jimmy Saville's Guide to Hospital Visiting but there are more substantial works of art produced that I find more difficult to ignore. Michael Jackson's Off The Wall album or approximately twenty Woody Allen films. (At least). In case you aren't aligned with the facts Woody Allen has been accused of lots of nasty things - none of which have ever been proved but no one is arguing that he ran off with his girlfriend's young daughter. (Fun fact, after Mia Farrow made the accusations against him, she was still happy to be in his film and was quite put out when she turned up to be measured for her costume and found the role had been passed to Diane Keaton. Ah Hollywood.) I still watch these films and get pleasure from them.

I was reading this week about Mike Pilavachi - the founder of Soul Survivor. As you may have seen, he has stepped back from ministry while the Church of England looks into accusations against him made by young men he worked with. I'm obviously not saying anything, one way or the other about his guilt or innocence. I did notice though that the C of E had a very hands-off approach to Safeguarding at Soul Survivor which doesn't strike me as the most brilliant idea. It is just the latest in a line of Christian leaders who weren't what we thought they were - Hillsong and Ravi Zacharias spring to mind but there are plenty of other names around. In the main, they seem to be people who found themselves in positions of power with little or no accountability to anyone else - at least on any kind of equal footing. When this is combined with a spiritual element - having someone in authority over you who you believe has God's ear and therefore you think they are always right. It's a very potent kind of power. And the higher up you get, the worse it becomes. John Sentamu (who himself has just had to step back from ministry, while his judgement on a safeguarding issue is looked into) said his mother used to say that people who got higher and higher up were like baboons climbing a tree. The higher up they get, the more of their unattractive bits you get to see. This is, I think a lesson for us all.

The thing is, we used to send our kids to Soul Survivor. For, those not in the know, Soul Survivor was a huge Christian holiday festival for young people - and I mean huge - annual attendance was between twenty-five and thirty-five thousand. Everyone I ever knew who went had the most fantastic time. Friendships were built, lives were impacted, romances began and countless blowup mattresses had their plugs surreptitiously removed. These lovely things come out of imperfect people and systems. But sometimes, the damage these people and systems do is almost irreparable. It will be very difficult as well for all those young people who have such positive and important memories of these things. Those who are given "leadership" are actually given precious lives to care for and protect. I think we all understand the pull of privilege and it seems that, for some, the attraction of a private plane or having someone hang on your every word can make your vision a bit wobbly. They maybe owe it to themselves to make sure there are people around to ask difficult questions - rather than their chums - and systems in place that keep reminding them that their bottom can be seen for miles around.