Christ Church Virginia Water and the Stephen Sizer Scandal
In December 2022 Stephen Sizer was found guilty of antisemitic activity by a Church of England tribunal. The tribunal banned him from “exercising any of the functions of his Holy Orders” for a period of twelve years.
This article will make the case that Christ Church Virginia Water (CCVW), the church pastored by Stephen Sizer from 1997–2017, was complicit in Sizer’s antisemitism.
CCVW’s unrepentant role in the Sizer scandal raises questions for the Gospel Partnerships network, which has thus far always rejected calls for action against CCVW. Antisemitism is contagious, especially when one considers that tolerating antisemitism is itself an antisemitic thing to do. It has spread from Sizer to his church and from his church to the South East Gospel Partnership, the Surrey Gospel Partnership, and the Gospel Partnerships network as a whole. It remains to be seen whether any church or any leader within the Gospel Partnerships network will put a stop to the spread.
Fraternising with Antisemites — CCVW’s Supportive Role
During the latter half of his pastorship, from 2007 to 2017, Stephen Sizer fraternised with some of the world’s worst antisemites. He fraternised with Holocaust deniers and with antisemites openly in favour of terrorism against Jewish civilians. In at least one case he knowingly and very deliberately fraternised with a terrorist.
Christianity teaches that no one is beyond redemption. Jesus himself was known as the “friend of sinners” because he spent time with people who were treated as moral outcasts. But Jesus confronted sinful behaviour, even itemising specific wrongdoing (Matthew 23:5–23; John 4:17–18). When he received hospitality at the homes of particularly notorious sinners, such as Levi or Zaccheus, they were already repentant (Luke 5:27–28; Luke 19:8–10). Jesus never gave the impression that he condoned the sinful behaviour of the people he associated with.
Sizer, on the other hand, always gave the impression that he condoned the sinful behaviour of the antisemites he associated with. Antisemites invited him to come alongside them because they knew he would never embarrass them by criticising them. Thanks to his position as a Church of England vicar, Sizer extended to these antisemites the aura of respectability. He conveyed the approval of Western officialdom. In this way Sizer legitimised a series of dangerous and extremist antisemites.
Sizer’s uncritical fraternising with antisemites is just one feature of his antisemitic conduct. But it’s a feature that’s particularly relevant to his former church, because CCVW gave him large annual sums for overseas travel and abundant travel leave. These benefits went far beyond anything CCVW might have been expected to provide. In brief, CCVW enabled Sizer’s antisemitic fraternising.
Zahra Mostafavi, Iran, 2007
In October 2007, Sizer travelled to Iran at the invitation of Zahra Mostafavi [pictured below], the daughter of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Two years before Sizer’s visit, she had publicly honoured female suicide bombers for their attacks on Israeli civilians. One such bomber, Andaleeb Taqataqah, approached a Jerusalem bus stop where she detonated a belt armed with explosives, nuts, bolts, and nails, killing six people and injuring a further 105.
According to Sizer’s account of his visit, his itinerary was overseen by Dr Javad Sharbaf. By that time, Sharbaf’s support for the international Holocaust denial movement was already public knowledge. In 2005, Sharbaf had corresponded with the infamous Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, offering his services and expressing “deep sorrow” over the UN’s endorsement of an annual Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Sizer’s time in Iran, a country rarely visited by Westerners, must have been a matter of interest and curiosity for his parishioners. His account of the visit was posted on his personal website and would surely have been read by many of CCVW’s members. Some of the parishioners in the university town of Virginia Water must have known that Iran actively seeks Israel’s destruction by, among other things, funding the terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah. It would not have taken great insight to discern Sizer’s usefulness to Zahra Mostafavi and the Iranian regime. He is one of the world’s most vocal opponents of Christian Zionism; Iran is one of the most extreme opponents of Zionism. Antizionism was, accordingly, the theme of Sizer’s visit: he was specifically invited “to give a series of lectures on the impact of Christian Zionism on the Middle East”, an impact that he described as “destructive”.
Sizer allowed Iran’s antizionism to co-opt his own antizionism. Like a black hole gaining mass by absorbing a star, Iran’s antizionism gained strength by absorbing Sizer’s hostility towards Israel.
It should be noted that Sizer did not limit himself, while in Iran, to observations about Christian Zionism. At a press conference hosted by the Iranian News Service, which Sizer described in his account as “exhilarating”, he claimed that Israel wanted to drive the Palestinians into the desert. He also came to the defence of the then president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, falsely claiming that Ahmadinejad’s recent remarks about Israel and the Holocaust had been distorted and misquoted by Zionists. (According to a report by the New York Times journalist Helene Cooper, Ahmadinejad had said that even if the Holocaust did occur, the Palestinians should not pay the price for it.)
Comparisons with the Nazi regime in Germany are usually crass and offensive, but in the case of Iran, they are justified. Iran openly seeks the destruction of Israel, which could not be achieved without the killing of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Israeli Jews. Seen in that light, the curves and sword emblem at the centre of the Iranian flag, chosen by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1980, is the closest parallel to the swastika in the contemporary world. Sizer’s time in Iran could justly be compared with an English clergyman visiting Nazi Germany in the 1930s to lecture on a theme that was congenial to the Nazis’ antisemitic aims.
Sizer returned to Iran to serve the regime again in 2014 (that visit is discussed below). He has also frequently appeared on Press TV, an English-speaking news network owned by the Iranian state. On 31 May 2023, Sizer signed a letter criticising the Charity Commission for taking punitive action against the Islamic Centre of England (ICE). ICE had been identified by the Chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee as an “outreach centre” for the Iranian regime and “an arm of the Iranian state.” It can safely be said that no other UK conservative evangelical leader has done more for the Iranian regime than Stephen Sizer. And because CCVW has never apologised for its former vicar’s conduct, and has remained associated with Sizer even in his retirement, it can also safely be said that no other UK conservative evangelical church has done more for the Iranian regime than CCVW.
There is no room for romanticism about Iran under its post-1979 regime. In November 2022, the Director-General of MI5 disclosed that UK security services had foiled ten attempts by Iran either to kidnap or kill British or UK-based individuals. It was also recently revealed that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an arm of the Iranian state, has broadcast antisemitic propaganda in Britain via the Islamic Students Association of Britain. The IRGC propaganda said the Holocaust was “fake”; it promised the “era of the Jews” would soon come to an end; and it urged British students to join “the beautiful list of soldiers” who would wage war against Jews.
In Iran itself, conversion to Christianity from Islam is a punishable offence. According to a US State Department report, “Authorities arrested, prosecuted, and gave long prison sentences to leaders of Christian convert groups, as well as lay members and Christians of other denominational backgrounds supporting them, for ‘crimes against national security.’” Barnabas Aid reports that “The authorities often engage in exhausting [converts] psychologically by continually releasing and re-arresting them in order to push them to flee abroad or return to Islam. Iranian intelligence officers regularly force arrested converts to sign an agreement promising never to meet with other Christians again after their release.” Such is the nature of the regime that CCVW has associated itself with, via the actions of its former leader.
If CCVW is no longer willing to be associated with the Iranian regime, it should apologise for the actions of its former pastor. In the absence of any apology from CCVW, the other churches in the Surrey Gospel Partnership should ask themselves if they’re content to remain in partnership with a church that sees nothing shameful in its former pastor’s ties with the antisemitic, anti-Christian Iranian regime.
Nabil Kaouk, Lebanon, 2008
In January 2008, Sizer met Sheikh Nabil Kaouk, a senior commander of Hezbollah, at a secret location in south Lebanon [the picture below was originally posted on Sizer’s website].
Hezbollah has been classified as a terrorist group by the US government since 1997. It has defended suicide bombing attacks against Israeli civilians as the Palestinians’ “most powerful weapon”. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has said “If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew.” He has rejected any conceivable notion of living in concord with Israel: “I am against any reconciliation with Israel. I do not even recognize the presence of a state that is called ‘Israel.’ … Hezbollah refuses any conciliation with Israel in principle.” He told an audience in Iran: “we all have an extraordinary historic opportunity to finish off the entire cancerous Zionist project.” According to a Hezbollah spokesman, the Jews who survive a war of liberation “can go back to Germany or wherever they came from.”
During the CofE tribunal, the year of Sizer’s meeting with Kaouk was erroneously identified as 2006. Sizer didn’t visit the south of Lebanon during his time in the country in 2006, and his pictures of the meeting with Kaouk are included in an album labelled “Photographs taken during a tour of liberated Southern Lebanon in January 2008 at the invitation of Al Manar TV” [see the screenshot below]. Sizer chose not to correct the tribunal’s error, probably because it allowed him to give the impression that the meeting with Kaouk was hard to refuse. In reality, Sizer travelled to Lebanon in 2008 for the express purpose of meeting Hezbollah representatives. Al-Manar TV, who issued the invitation, is the broadcasting arm of Hezbollah.
According to Sizer’s testimony in the 2022 tribunal, CCVW paid his travel expenses. The confusion over the year of the visit makes Sizer’s testimony suspect, but since CCVW habitually gave him thousands of pounds a year for international travel, it’s very likely CCVW paid for its pastor to fly to Lebanon to meet with terrorists.
When a pastor is respected by both sides of a conflict between terrorists and a nation state, he may be able to carry out a useful mediating role. But Sizer has only ever been respected by one side in the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. If CCVW is a church that rejects terrorism, it should renounce its ties to Sizer and apologise for any involvement it had in funding the 2008 visit.
Voice of Palestine Conference in Jakarta, 2008
In May 2008, Sizer travelled to Jakarta, Indonesia, for a conference hosted by Voice of Palestine [see photos below]. At the CofE tribunal, Sizer testified that the trip was probably paid for by CCVW.
The conference’s opening remarks were delivered by the above-mentioned Zahra Mostafavi, the Iranian supporter of female suicide bombing attacks on Israeli civilians. The closing remarks were delivered by the above-mentioned Javad Sharbaf, a Holocaust denier. The conference was also addressed by the late Holocaust denier Fredrick Töben. His speech included the following comments [grammatical mistakes corrected]:
Remember, Adolf Hitler’s only crime was to disconnect from the international capitalist system, just as Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Zimbabwe did. We now know that internationalists hate people to be free of financial enslavement.
The historical myth called the Jewish Holocaust-Shoah began in the 1970s when the word ‘holocaust’ was first used.
To this day the re-education program implemented by the Jews, who alone have committed venal crimes for centuries, aims to get Germans to relinquish themselves as Germans … The Jews and their willing helpers sustain and maintain these Holocaust-Shoah fabrications through legal prosecution/persecution, in the name of human rights, while the human rights are being ignored of those who refuse to believe in such monstrous lies that Germans systematically exterminated six million Jews in huge chemical slaughterhouses.
When Sizer returned home, he could have criticised the organisers for giving Fredrick Töben a platform to preach Holocaust denial. But in his account of his time in Indonesia, posted a few days after the end of the conference, Sizer didn’t include a word of criticism, nor did he distance himself from the conference in any way.
In March 2009, a blog named “Seismic Shock” criticised Sizer for his involvement in the conference. The blogpost included the following images from the website of Voice of Palestine, the conference organisers:
[The black portion of the dove is a map of the territory at issue; peace in that region, represented by the dove, is being violently attacked by Jews, represented by the Star of David, with the assistance of America.]
Sizer could have responded to the Seismic Shock blogpost by taking the opportunity to issue a belated apology for his participation in a conference that promoted Holocaust denial. Instead, later in 2009, he reported the Seismic Shock blogger, Joseph Weissman, to the police. This incident attracted widespread publicity, including articles on the BBC website and in the Guardian, because of its implications for free speech.
The Seismic Shock controversy is significant for establishing CCVW’s complicity in its pastor’s antisemitism. Weissman had accused Sizer of associating with Holocaust deniers, an allegation mentioned in both the BBC’s and the Guardian’s articles. Anyone at CCVW concerned about that allegation could have quickly found Weissman’s post about Sizer’s visit to Indonesia. If the cartoons copied above weren’t enough proof of the antisemitic nature of the conference hosts, Weissman’s well-substantiated blogpost also included a link to Fredrick Töben’s account of his participation in the conference.
In this way, CCVW’s members, staff, and parochial church council members could easily have verified that their leader had indeed associated unapologetically with at least one Holocaust denier. Either they failed to verify that allegation, or, having verified it, they failed to take any significant action in response. If Sizer was right to assume in his tribunal evidence that CCVW paid for his flights, that would obviously make CCVW yet more complicit.
Mike Allan and Viva Palestina Malaysia, 2011
Mike Allan is a British expatriate in Malaysia who openly denies the Holocaust. When the former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said of the Holocaust, “They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred”, Allan wrote that Ahmadinejad was “a genius”. Allan went on to say [misspellings corrected]: “The Zionist pigs must be shaking in their rotten jack boots right now. Nervous at all this attention to the Holocaust and the illegitimacy of their theft of Palestine … the Holocaust has fed the Zionists and made them what they are today.”
In the same online forum, Allan set out his own case for denying the Holocaust, arguing, “Why de-louse them on arrival if they were to be killed later?” and “If the mass extermination of the Jews was in fact the grandiose plan, then why, on assembling a collection of Jews, were they transported? … It would have been far more in the Nazis’ interests to shove them into some town hall room, barricade the door and expose them to gas, or even just shoot them at some assembly point and bury them where they were shot.”
Allan invited Sizer to visit Malaysia on behalf of an organisation named Viva Palestina Malaysia (VPM). In January 2011, the year when Sizer visited, VPM had posted an article on its website and Facebook page calling for the relocation of all Jewish inhabitants of Israel to Birobidzhan — i.e., Siberia.
At the time of Sizer’s visit, one of the leading Viva Palestina activists in Malaysia was Matthias Chang, a speaker at Iran’s 2006 Holocaust denial conference. Chang had told the conference that Germany “had the right to defend itself against the Zionists’ agenda to annihilate Germany and her citizens.” Excerpts from his speech were posted on the website of the British People’s Party, a neo-Nazi group. The conference was denounced around the world and was described by the then Prime Minister Tony Blair as “shocking beyond belief”.
While in Malaysia, Sizer told outright lies likely to provoke hatred of Jewish people (sadly, antisemitism is rife in Malaysia). He claimed, for example, in an interview on Malaysian TV, that in Britain “the Zionists” were collaborating with neo-Nazis against Muslims. And in a newspaper interview that he republished in full on his blog, Sizer claimed that US politicians could only speak their minds on Israel after retiring, because “the Israel lobby buys every single politician”. Sizer would have known that what he was saying was untrue, because a year earlier he had himself written a blogpost about the US Secretary of State “rebuking Israel”.
There was only one British conservative evangelical pastor who would accept a speaking invitation from Mike Allan and the other antisemites of Viva Palestina Malaysia: Stephen Sizer. And there was only one British conservative evangelical church willing to let its pastor carry out that kind of international “ministry”: Christ Church Virginia Water.
Raed Salah, UK, 2011
In June 2011, Raed Salah managed to get into the UK despite being banned from entry (causing uproar in the media as a result). At the time, Salah was charged in Israel with inciting antisemitism. The charges related to a speech Salah had given in Jerusalem in which he repeated the virulent antisemitic myth known as the blood libel:
We have never allowed ourselves, and listen well, we have never allowed ourselves to knead the bread for the breaking of the fast during the blessed month of Ramadan with the blood of the children. And if someone wants a wider explanation, you should ask what used to happen to some of the children of Europe, whose blood would be mixed in the dough of the holy bread. God almighty, is this religion? Is this what God wants? God will confront you for what you are doing.
Not wanting to miss an opportunity to fraternise with an antisemite, Sizer bought Salah dinner at a North London restaurant [picture below] on 27 July 2011.
During Sizer’s CofE tribunal, his fraternising with Salah was excused on the basis that it was “unclear why [Sizer] should have known of Raed Salah’s background at the time of his visits”. But that was a very odd conclusion because the media coverage of Salah’s illegitimate arrival inevitably provided background information to explain why he’d been banned from entry.
For example, on 30 June 2011, the BBC journalist John Ware reported that “sources insist charges [against Salah] relating to incitement to racism are still outstanding”. Sizer quoted from that very article in his uncritical write-up of his meeting with Salah. On 6 July 2011, three weeks before Sizer and Salah’s dinner, the outstanding charges against Salah had been published by the Community Security Trust. The fact that Salah had been charged with inciting antisemitism did not dissuade Sizer from meeting him and blogging enthusiastically about the experience. As the ordained leader of a CofE church, he conveyed the impression that he himself, CCVW, Christians in general, and by extension Jesus Christ were all untroubled by antisemitism.
Al-Etejah TV, UK, 2014
In April 2014 Sizer began hosting “a weekly book and film review programme” for Al-Etejah, a satellite television channel. He hosted this show for two years. Al-Etejah is the broadcasting arm of Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi terrorist group associated with both the Lebanon-based Hezbollah that Sizer visited in 2008 and also Iran’s Quds Force. The Obama administration designated Kataib Hezbollah a terrorist organisation in 2009, citing “multiple rocket-propelled grenade and improvised rocket-assisted mortar attacks”.
Sizer’s ongoing role with Al-Etejah was reported in the UK national media in August 2015. Following that national media report, it would surely have been reasonable for CCVW’s members to ask why their vicar was hosting a weekly TV programme on behalf of terrorists. Purely as a matter of fiduciary diligence, CCVW parochial church council members could have asked whether their vicar was using office hours or church equipment to prepare and film weekly TV episodes in association with terrorists. If CCVW is a church that rejects terrorism, it should renounce its ties to Sizer, who served the terrorists of Kataib Hezbollah by working for their TV channel. It should also apologise for its astonishing lack of vigilance in the past.
The Second New Horizon Conference, Iran, 2014
In October 2014, Sizer received national media attention for participating in the second New Horizon conference in Iran. At the time, CCVW was allocating Sizer £6,000 per year “to support his work overseas”. The conference was backed by the Holocaust-denying Iranian regime, and it took place eight years after an Iranian Holocaust-denying conference attracted global condemnation. Sure enough, one of the themes for discussion listed in the conference programme was “9/11 and the Holocaust as pro-Zionist ‘Public Myths’”.
Among Sizer’s fellow-attendees were French “comedian” Dieudonné M’bala M’bala: “Those who persecuted Jesus Christ are the same as those who persecuted the Prophet of Islam. It is always the same people. These are the people who serve Satan, and I dream that one day … we will be able to fight this satanic spirit which is now heading the highest international institutions”; French far-right activist Thomas Werlet: “We are fed up with this Judeo-Zionist propaganda which aims to destroy free peoples in order to establish a universal cosmopolitan dictatorship”; Italian professor Claudio Moffa: “the [Holocaust] ‘deniers’ convince me more and more”; and US-based conspiracy theorist Kevin Barrett: “I know, not just believe, that 9/11 was a false-flag attack, that many individuals at or near the top of the US Executive Branch, military, and intelligence apparatus were complicit in the attack, and that the state of Israel and its American agents were heavily involved.”
On his return from Tehran, Sizer faced criticism for giving legitimacy to the conference by his presence as an ordained CofE clergyman. Instead of apologising, as one American participant did on returning home, Sizer chose to issue a sinister warning, which was reported in the UK national media: “Those who criticise this kind of conference must think very carefully of the consequences of their words for Jews and Christians in countries like Iran.” From Sizer’s point of view, the conference wasn’t the problem, it was the conference’s critics. In the opinion of the author, the members of CCVW did not lack the intellectual ability to question Sizer’s participation in the conference. What they lacked was sound ethical judgement and loving concern for the Jewish people.
CCVW’s Complicity
At the end of 2011, CCVW’s staff members were sent an article carefully detailing Sizer’s antisemitic conduct. Shortly afterwards, the correspondent who sent the article had a phone conversation with Revd Francis Blight, an assistant pastor at CCVW. From that time onwards, CCVW cannot claim the excuse of ignorance (an excuse that would have defied credulity and — in light of Leviticus 4:2, Psalm 19:12, and the principle of due diligence — would not have absolved CCVW of responsibility).
Most institutions will tend to give their leader the benefit of the doubt, at least to begin with. But it would have been possible at numerous points for CCVW to give Sizer the benefit of the doubt with conditions attached. For example, after Sizer had posted links to at least five different antisemitic websites, CCVW’s parochial church council could have told him that if it happened again, the church would use every means at its disposal to register its disapproval of his pastorship, including the CofE’s complaints process. But there’s no indication that CCVW ever issued any such ultimatum, and Sizer’s links to antisemitic websites kept coming. As the evidence below will demonstrate, CCVW has always been entirely supportive of Sizer, without any conditions attached, both during and after his pastorship.
The ironclad nature of CCVW’s support for Sizer became clear in 2015. In January 2015, Sizer revisited the antisemitic myth of Israeli involvement in 9/11 that he’d already floated via a footnote in his 2004 book on Christian Zionism. He posted a link on his Facebook page to an article titled “9/11: Israel Did It” on the antisemitic website “WikiSpooks”. This led to a media frenzy: the story was covered by, among other websites and newspapers, BBC Online, ITV.com, The Times, the Telegraph, the Mirror, the Daily Mail, the Independent and the Guardian. Everyone at CCVW would have known that their senior minister had become, in the words of one headline, the “9/11 Israel Conspiracy Priest”.
The Church of England’s disciplinary process could have freed CCVW from Sizer’s leadership. But there is no evidence that any CCVW staff member or congregation member ever lodged a formal allegation of misconduct against Sizer in 2015 or in any other year.
After Sizer gained nationwide notoriety, CCVW kept on giving him large sums of money for his overseas work, despite the possibility that this could fund antisemitic tours like his earlier visits to Iran, Lebanon, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Iran (again). He received £6,000 in 2015 and another £6,000 in 2016.
In 2017, the year of Sizer’s retirement from CCVW, the church paid him £5,523 “to support his international ministry”. Sizer retired on 16 April, which means CCVW gave him more than £1,500 per month to spend on international travel in the lead-up to his retirement. In February of that year, Sizer broke a pledge he had made to his bishop not to comment on Middle Eastern current affairs (this was the second time he had broken that pledge). As a result, he was banned from all preaching, teaching, leading of services, and social media activity, with the exception of his farewell service on Easter Sunday. Yet there is no indication that CCVW took the opportunity to recoup any of the £5,523 allotted for Sizer’s overseas work in 2017, despite the needless inconvenience caused to his church by his pledge-breaking and the resultant ministry ban.
CCVW’s Post-Retirement Support for Sizer
Shortly after Sizer’s retirement, in May 2017, CCVW provided its premises for the launch of his charity, Peacemaker Mediators (later renamed Peacemaker Trust).
In that year, CCVW donated £4,200 to the newly-formed charity. The money kept on flowing: £6,600 in 2018, under the leadership of CCVW’s new vicar, Revd Simon Vibert; £5,250 in 2019; £4,800 in 2020; and £4,200 in 2021 — at the time of writing, the last year for which figures are available. In both 2019 and 2020, Peacemaker Trust received a “Mission of the Month” write-up in CCVW’s Connection magazine. And, in January 2020, Sizer returned to CCVW, the church where he had once been banned from all preaching and teaching, to speak on three separate occasions.
Sizer’s Successor: Revd Dr Simon Vibert
Simon Vibert arrived at CCVW in 2017. His reluctance to speak out against Sizer prior to the December 2022 tribunal verdict is somewhat understandable. There must be some members of CCVW who remain grateful for the uncontroversial side of Sizer’s work and naively take him at his word when, for example, he claims to have linked to an antisemitic website by accident. It would likely have caused unrest in the church if, on his arrival in 2017, Vibert had firmly distanced himself and CCVW from Sizer. Such considerations may explain the statement Vibert made in correspondence in 2020: “I have not felt it my duty to try to unpick my predecessor’s position”.
However, just because a person’s course of action is understandable doesn’t make it righteous. Given Sizer’s national notoriety, Vibert should have engaged with Jewish community representatives to find out why Sizer’s conduct had caused so much offence; he should have considered Sizer’s record of hollow apologies, which demonstrated a refusal to comply with criticism he supposedly accepted; and he should have noted the needlessly-broken pledges that led to Sizer’s teaching and preaching ban during his final months at CCVW. This information-gathering would have equipped Vibert to engage with pro-Sizer members of the congregation, and to prepare the church for corporate repentance — a thoroughly biblical act (see, for example, Daniel 9:4–11). Vibert’s failure to lead the church in corporate repentance, combined with his willingness to let more than £20,000 flow from CCVW to Sizer’s charity, had the effect of maintaining CCVW’s complicity in Sizer’s antisemitism.
In December 2022, the Church of England’s verdict on Sizer offered Vibert a wide-open opportunity to make amends for his earlier failure to take a righteous stand. CCVW is a CofE church. No one would have been surprised if CCVW had issued a statement acknowledging the CofE’s verdict and apologising for its own role in supporting Sizer’s activity. A correspondent pointed out to Vibert in January 2023 that “a full and frank apology to the Jewish community from Christ Church Virginia Water would completely change the situation.” The correspondent went on to say, “The Church of England has now confirmed what British Jews have been saying for a long time: Stephen Sizer was guilty of antisemitic activity. That happened while Stephen was the leader of Christ Church Virginia Water. The church supported him at the time, and continued to support him financially after his retirement, during your own time as leader.” Vibert didn’t reply, and, eight months later, CCVW still hasn’t issued any apology.
CCVW’s lack of corporate repentance following the CofE’s verdict demonstrates a major failure of Christian leadership. What was once somewhat understandable is now anything but.
In the leadership vacuum created by Vibert’s silence, CCVW member Tim Unwin has publicly defended Sizer on social media (no doubt also doing so over coffee at church). On 12 March 2023, he said, “I still find it hard to understand why the Church of England’s leadership gave Stephen Sizer a 12 year ban … a 12 year ban for one post a long while ago that was taken down and for which he apologised seems a very tough sentence. All is not well in the leadership of the Church of England.” Unwin has preached at CCVW, and his wife is the church’s Parish Safeguarding Representative, so his words carry weight among the congregation.
It’s Simon Vibert’s responsibility to ensure that CCVW’s members, such as Tim Unwin, understand that while the CofE tribunal found Sizer guilty of antisemitic activity on just one count — the post mentioned by Unwin — it found him guilty of “provoking or offending the Jewish community” on three additional counts (see paragraph 150 of the Decision), each of which crossed the significant legal threshold known as “conduct unbecoming for an ordained minister”, thereby establishing a pattern of highly reprehensible insensitivity towards Jewish people.
What’s more, CCVW’s members need to understand that the particular apology noted by Unwin cannot be taken seriously. Three years after apologising for the post in question (“I very much regret and apologise for the distress caused by the sharing on Facebook of a link to an article about 9/11”), Sizer undermined that apology when he said, on Australian national radio in 2018, “With hindsight, I probably wish I hadn’t put a hyperlink to an article about 9/11. The particular article was a list of Israelis who had benefited from 9/11 … so far no one has come back to me and contradicted anything that was in the article.” This interview was highlighted by the CofE tribunal as evidence of Sizer’s inadequate contrition for his 9/11 link: “it is of great concern that the Respondent was not more contrite in his apology for posting the article”.
Finally, Vibert’s flock also needs to grasp that the CofE tribunal found that “on crucial issues” Sizer’s account of events was “on occasions … implausible and untrue”, and therefore the tribunal “rejected his evidence”. The tribunal was made up of a KC, three members of the clergy, and a Diocesan Secretary. In plain English — which is sometimes necessary for clarity — they called Sizer a liar.
A Church and Network Contaminated by Antisemitism
If Simon Vibert disagrees with the tribunal’s verdict, he should carefully and publicly explain why he disagrees. The due process followed by the tribunal would need to be matched, so far as possible, by his own research and counter-arguments. On the other hand, if he agrees with the verdict, he should now lead the church in corporate repentance at the earliest possible opportunity.
The Labour Party has sought to demonstrate that it has made a decisive break with its antisemitic past. Keir Starmer has apologised to the Jewish community for Labour’s actions under his predecessor. Such public statements are essential — without them, one can only assume continuity. Until Simon Vibert makes a similarly unequivocal apology, CCVW will remain contaminated, in the eyes of Jewish onlookers and their evangelical friends, by its complicity in Stephen Sizer’s antisemitism.
After the Church of England’s December 2022 ruling against Sizer, a statement was issued by the author of this article and James Mendelsohn, another campaigner against antisemitism. The statement commented on the ruling and called on the Gospel Partnerships network to exclude CCVW from the network if it failed to apologise unreservedly. The statement did not pass unnoticed: it was mentioned and quoted in a major article in Evangelicals Now. Eight months later, CCVW hasn’t apologised and the Surrey Gospel Partnership hasn’t excluded it.
Evangelical unity requires a high degree of doctrinal and moral harmony. A church that began endorsing same-sex marriage, for example, would surely not be allowed to remain in the Surrey Gospel Partnership. The question raised by the Stephen Sizer scandal is whether antisemitism matters as much to British evangelicals as sexual immorality. Thus far, the answer has always been “no”. British evangelicals typically dislike the assertion that they are obsessed with sex, to the exclusion of other areas of morality. But the Sizer scandal suggests that this characterisation may be accurate.
The ongoing presence of CCVW in the Gospel Partnerships network sends a clear signal to Jewish people: antisemitism does not matter to British evangelicals. For as long as the status quo continues, the whole network will be contaminated by its toleration of antisemitism.
