A letter to complainant 1: the death of effective youth ministry
By Louise Greentree
Congratulations Complainant 1.
You have achieved what Satan has been unable to achieve for some generations. You have been a cause of the destruction of opportunities for effective youth ministry in the Anglican Church Sydney diocese. As a youth minister in the Anglican Church yourself, you would be expected to know better. But by your totally misconceived complaint to the Sydney PSU you are the cause of amendments to the Discipline Ordinance 2006 to create an ‘offence’ that did not exist when you were being mentored for Christian ministry by a youth minister who took his job seriously and performed it well. He nurtured fledgling Christians, you included, in the life of those born again. He gave wise advice to those, you included, who were struggling with issues of sexuality. And he set a program of accountability for those, you included, who were being trapped into addiction to internet pornography.
Now, of course, no youth minister, you included, will be able to give such wise Christian counsel and agape love to young Christians in their struggles, for fear that a neurotic or mentally disturbed or malicious person will go to the PSU and make a complaint, even many years later after having milked the relationship with him, you included, in the meantime to get whatever advantage they could from it.
I would like to believe that you were misled by incompetent people in the PSU but, on your instructions, your solicitor wrote to me that this was not so and that you were perfectly capable of reading the Discipline Ordinance 2006 for yourself.
But here’s the thing: there is nothing in the Discipline Ordinance 2006 under which your complaint could properly have been brought because it does not involve sexual misconduct nor disgraceful and scandalous conduct. This is something that you, claiming (through your solicitor) to be a competent interpreter of that highly flawed piece of church law, surely must have realised from the start. After all, as you have told a Christian woman of unimpeachable probity, you never did think there was anything of a sexual nature involved in Drew’s relationship with you. And as must be apparent to everyone, Drew’s lawful, non-sexual and non-sinful behaviour towards you and many others of the youth ministry could not by any stretch of the imagination be called ‘disgraceful’ and nor did it cause a scandal although widely known about. It was even approved.
So your complaint was always false.
But you are directly responsible for certain members of the church organisation trying to cover their tracks in not giving you wise advice about your misconceived complaint and to cover-up the way the director PSU systematically lied to and bullied Drew. They have conceived of a new ‘offence’ that Synod members meekly passed like lambs to the slaughter. This is the offence of ‘inappropriate pastoral conduct involving a child’.
It is a complete set-up. It attempts to use the almost totally advisory, risk management document that is Faithfulness in Service (FIS) which came into effect in October 2004, to decide what behaviour (not otherwise covered by the Discipline Ordinance 2006) is ‘inappropriate’. Almost the only places where FIS uses language that is prescriptive (that is, it says that someone MUST do something) is in clauses directed towards the person responsible for the parish – that is, the rector or senior minister, not an employee.
Are you willing to have the Rector of your former parish where you were brought up brought before the diocesan tribunal charged with inappropriate pastoral behaviour towards you because he failed to provide a risk management plan to all the employees of the parish? Which he did not do and which makes him ultimately responsible if Drew or some other employee of the parish were to be found ‘guilty’ under this new offence, even though applied retrospectively to a period of time before FIS even existed. You might think that this could not happen. But you do not know. If someone influential in the diocese wants to trash his legacy of faithful ministry then this gives them that opportunity.
You really are like the little boy who dropped the pebble at the top of the snow-covered mountain and caused an avalanche. Only in this case, you are not, like him, the cause of killing hundreds of people and wiping out their villages. Your complaint and the fallout of the creation of this new ‘offence’ is killing effective Christian ministry to young people just at a time when depressive illnesses, addictions to internet pornography, drugs and alcohol, indiscriminate sex outside marriage, social alienation and youth suicide is being manifested in frightening numbers in society at large. The Christian church needs to be able to give effective ministry to these vulnerable, unhappy and desperate young people. What is needed is far more than just arranging some ‘fun’ camps over the weekend and trying to keep the girls (or other boys) out of the boys’ beds for that weekend at least.
You had in Drew the example of someone who went the extra mile for the young people he ministered to, including you; he already had programs to help them, and you, not just into adulthood but also into mature Christian faith.
Now, no-one, not even you, will be able to be a competent and effective youth minister out of fear. Fear that his best and sincerest efforts, and yours, will be misconstrued by ‘someone’ (the amendment ordinance does not say who will have this power) and result in a charge designed to destroy his, and your, ministry AND the faith that he, and you, engendered in many young people under his, and your, care.
Over the 12 years he was at the parish Drew’s youth ministry nurtured many hundreds, possibly a thousand or more young people into Christian faith and Christian life, including a significant number serving overseas as missionaries. This is his legacy for which God will surely reward him.
Now, no young person will be able to receive the benefits that others, including you, have received in the past from the dedicated ministry of Drew and others like him.
This is your legacy.