Scandalous Justice Part 2: The Absence of Biblical Due Process in the Stephen Sizer Scandal
It is not so much argument which we want, as grace, the secret gentle effusions of grace upon all our hearts. This will give us a riper knowledge of the Bible, a firmer grasp of the capital doctrines of the gospel, a more full apprehension of the person and glory of Christ, a deeper sense of the evil of sin, a warmer love to God and man, a more holy spirit of abstraction from the world, and a more fervent temper of prayer and communion with God.
Daniel Wilson, Bishop of Calcutta, A Charge Delivered to the Clergy (1843)
PREFACE
This is the second part of an article about conservative evangelical leaders failing to apply due process in their handling of scandals. The first part of the article defined biblical due process, briefly reviewed the Smyth scandal, and examined one aspect of the Fletcher scandal. This second part will survey the Stephen Sizer antisemitism scandal and draw some wider conclusions for British conservative evangelicals.
In both the Fletcher scandal and the Sizer scandal, William Taylor of St Helen’s Bishopsgate has received significant assistance from John Stevens, National Director of the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (FIEC). These cases are therefore relevant to Anglican and nonconformist evangelicals alike.
Antisemitism in British Society and among Evangelicals
According to the Community Security Trust, there were 4,103 reported antisemitic hate incidents in 2023, a record high that was double the previous record, set in 2021. One example of antisemitism’s presence in Britain is the 2024 Rochdale parliamentary by-election. After Labour suspended its candidate due to his antisemitic comments, the seat was won by George Galloway, who has characterised the October 7 attacks as an operation against “military personnel”, and who has channelled funds from Britain to Hamas, the terrorists who aim to destroy the world’s only Jewish-majority state.
In this shameful context, evangelical Christians ought to be a source of support for the British Jewish community. However, the opposite has been true. As the rest of this article will show, British evangelicals tolerated and harboured the antisemitic pastor Stephen Sizer for more than a decade. Even now, eighteen months after Sizer was found guilty of antisemitic conduct and banned from ministry for twelve years, evangelical leaders aren’t speaking about him with a united voice. John Stevens insists that the failure of evangelicals to take action against Sizer wasn’t scandalous at all. Stephen Hofmeyr, one of the top-ranking leaders of the Church of England Evangelical Council, continues to endorse Sizer’s ministry. But other evangelical leaders have apologised for their failings regarding Sizer. The case is self-evidently unresolved.
The argument of this article is that British evangelicals would never have got themselves into this position if they had diligently applied the principles of biblical justice.
Stephen Sizer: Conservative Evangelical Antisemite
From 1997–2017, Stephen Sizer was the vicar of Christ Church Virginia Water (CCVW), a Church of England parish church in Surrey. CCVW was easily recognisable as a conservative evangelical church during Sizer’s pastorship: it ran Christianity Explored courses; it belonged to the South East Gospel Partnership; and it hosted special evangelistic events.
While Sizer was vicar of CCVW, he gained a global reputation for opposing Christian Zionism. The core idea of Zionism is that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish-majority state; Christian support for that idea is denoted by the term Christian Zionism. Sizer wrote that Christian Zionism “justifies the intrinsic racism endemic to Zionism.” He published two books on the subject and travelled around the world to promote his antizionist message.
Sizer’s antizionism is arguably antisemitic in itself — one of the examples of antisemitism given by the widely-adopted IHRA definition is “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination”. However, Sizer was very rarely criticised for his antizionism alone. Instead, he was criticised for the way in which he opposed Israel. Just as using the N-word is an established anti-Black taunt, there are also well-established anti-Jewish taunts. These include: characterising Jewish people as Christ killers or child killers; denying or downplaying the Holocaust; inverting the Holocaust by likening Jewish people to the Nazis; blaming Jewish people for societal problems via financial or political conspiracy theories; and accusing Jews of murders they didn’t commit. One contemporary version of that final slur is the accusation that Israel was responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America. Sizer made use of all those antisemitic taunts in his antizionist campaigning.
On top of his own antisemitic statements, Sizer unapologetically associated himself with overt antisemites, including Holocaust deniers and terrorists. He once tried to donate church funds to an openly pro-Hamas group running convoys from Britain to Gaza. He repeatedly associated himself with the governing regime of Iran, which denies the Holocaust, funds Hamas, and seeks the destruction of Israel—something that couldn’t be achieved without the killing of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Israeli Jews. Sizer also shamelessly accepted an invitation to visit Lebanon from Al-Manar TV, the broadcasting arm of Hezbollah, a terrorist organisation whose leader once stated “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.” Sizer later went a step further and presented a weekly TV show for Al-Etejah, the broadcasting arm of Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi terrorist group with ties to the Lebanon-based Hezbollah.
A third feature of Sizer’s antisemitic conduct is his unceasing habit of posting links to antisemitic websites: The Ugly Truth, Veterans Today, Redress, Window into Palestine, Palestine Telegraph, Wikispooks, Counterpunch, Countercurrents, and others. (The preceding links are to posts discussing Sizer’s online activity, not to the websites themselves.) In 2012, when the late Mike Ovey was principal of Oak Hill College, he said in an email to the author, “If a member of my Faculty had made these links, I would have had no course, nor inclination, but to dismiss them.”
By 2011, all three of those features of Sizer’s antisemitic conduct were already in place: the antisemitic taunts, the cooperation with overt antisemites, and the links to antisemitic websites. Accordingly, from 2011 onwards, Jewish evangelicals sought to persuade evangelical leaders to take action against him. However, evangelical leaders chose instead to tolerate him and even defend him. This had the effect of tainting the evangelical movement, because it’s antisemitic to tolerate antisemitism. The disciplinary process that led, at long last, to Sizer’s ministry ban was initiated by a Jewish community group and was overseen by the largely non-evangelical governing hierarchy of the Church of England.
A Summary of Evangelicalism’s Toleration of Stephen Sizer
Evangelicals Now (EN)
Key individuals: Adrian Reynolds (current chair of the board of directors); David Baker (current editor)
In 2011, EN’s governing board was shown evidence of Sizer’s antisemitic conduct and chose not to do anything in response. Ten years later, in correspondence with the author, the board refused to apologise for its negligence.
For more than a decade, from 2011–June 2022, EN’s editorial team chose not to report that Sizer had been accused of antisemitic conduct. This was a period when Sizer was publicly criticised by Jewish evangelicals, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Community Security Trust, the Jewish Leadership Council, and the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities. The Jewish Chronicle published fifty-six articles about Sizer during that timeframe, and the allegations against Sizer were also reported by all the major national media sites, such as the BBC website, The Times, and the Telegraph. But EN kept its readers in the dark. In 2022, EN’s editorial team issued an apology that was far too vague—“We are sorry where we ourselves have not got things right in this area”—to indicate any meaningful repentance.
Read more about EN’s role in the scandal here.
The South East Gospel Partnership (SEGP)
Key individuals: William Taylor; Richard Coekin; Brian O’Donoghue; Nick McQuaker
No one was better placed to address Sizer’s conduct than the leaders of the regional network to which Sizer’s church belonged. From 2012 to 2017 (when Sizer retired), William Taylor and other SEGP leaders brushed aside Sizer’s early links to antisemitic websites; his attempted donation of church funds to an openly pro-Hamas convoy; his participation in an Iranian conference described by Jewish leaders in a Telegraph report as “an anti-Semitic hate-fest”; and his infamous Facebook link to an article claiming Israel masterminded 9/11. The SEGP Steering Committee could have excluded Sizer’s church from its network, which would have demonstrated solidarity with British Jews in the fight against antisemitism. Excluding Sizer’s church would also have shown evangelicals that antisemitism mustn’t be tolerated. But no such action was taken.
William Taylor has apparently never changed the position he took in 2012: “I personally see no justifiable grounds for breaking gospel partnership with Stephen or with Christ Church Virginia Water.” Taylor and the other SEGP leaders have never apologised to the British Jewish community for tolerating an antisemitic pastor in their network. Taylor, Coekin, O’Donoghue, and McQuaker continue to hold leadership positions in British evangelicalism. None of them have demonstrated repentance for their part in the Sizer scandal.
Read more about SEGP’s role in the scandal here.
Christ Church Virginia Water (CCVW)
Key individual: Simon Vibert (Sizer’s successor as pastor)
CCVW cannot claim to have been unaware of its pastor’s antisemitic activity. As early as 2010, allegations about Sizer’s willingness to associate himself with Holocaust deniers were reported in the national media (BBC Online and the Guardian). These allegations were well-founded: Sizer unapologetically took part in a 2008 conference where one of his fellow speakers declared, “The Jews, who alone have committed venal crimes for centuries … sustain and maintain these Holocaust-Shoah fabrications … 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 2014, Sizer again received national media attention for participating in another conference featuring overt antisemitism in its programme. Then, in 2015, Sizer’s 9/11 Facebook link was reported by all the major national news sites, including the BBC website; The Times; the Telegraph, the Mirror, the Daily Mail, the Independent and the Guardian.
Sizer even brought his antisemitism into CCVW’s pulpit, saying, “If ever a nation had everything it needed to succeed, it was Israel. But the vine produced wild grapes. Instead of practising justice, it practised oppression as it does today, instead of righteousness, it produced unrighteousness. Only this week Israel was censured by the UN for refusing to sign the Nuclear weapons treaty. God had to deal with the nation Israel and chasten it, but it was no use. When God’s Son came to the vineyard, they said ‘This is the heir’ and they killed Him. And so ceased to be the vineyard of the Lord.” Sizer’s words to his congregation were antisemitic because he characterised Israel—past and present—as a nation of unrighteous oppressors deserving other nations’ disapproval. By this “flattening and homogenising”, Sizer’s wholly negative portrayal of Israel stirred up distrust of all Israelites.
For those and other reasons, CCVW cannot claim ignorance. Yet CCVW regularly allocated Sizer as much as £6,000 per year “to support his work overseas”. In his final months at CCVW, Sizer was banned by his bishop from all preaching, teaching, leading of services, and social media activity. But CCVW still didn’t get the message: it donated £25,000 of church funds—the gifts of God’s people—to Sizer’s one-person organisation, Peacemaker Trust, in the years following his retirement.
CCVW has never apologised to British Jews for its complicity in Sizer’s activity. It has never distanced itself in any way from its disgraced former pastor.
Read more about CCVW’s role in the scandal here.
The Surrey Gospel Partnership
Imagine that the former pastor of a conservative evangelical church has been found guilty of anti-Black racist conduct. Imagine his church had been aware for years of the allegations of anti-Black racism surrounding its pastor, but had nevertheless eagerly supplied him with generous funding and time off to pursue the overseas “ministry” that generated many of those allegations, and then continued to fund his activity after he retired. Imagine the church neither apologised nor indicated any remorse after its denomination gave its former pastor a twelve-year ministry ban because of his anti-Black activity. In such circumstances, would the Surrey Gospel Partnership continue to treat the church in question as a welcome member of its network? If not, why is anti-Jewish racism different?
Ever since the South East Gospel Partnership was broken up into smaller regional partnerships, around 2018–19, CCVW has belonged to the Surrey Gospel Partnership (SGP). In 2023, all the SGP lead pastors were made aware of Sizer’s ministry ban and the lack of any apology from CCVW. It was put to those pastors that “If the churches of the Surrey Gospel Partnership are willing to continue in partnership with CCVW in the absence of any such apology, the only reasonable conclusion will be that the Surrey Gospel Partnership is complicit in antisemitism.” But none of the pastors engaged in a meaningful way with the correspondent, and nothing has changed since. CCVW remains unrepentant and in good standing with the other SGP churches. This is an example of the toleration of antisemitism by both Anglican and nonconformist evangelical churches.
Read more about SGP’s role in the scandal here.
The Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC)
Key individuals: Michael Lawson, National Chairman (2009–2014); Stephen Hofmeyr, treasurer and trustee; John Dunnett, National Director
In 2012, Michael Lawson wrote a letter defending Sizer that was posted on Sizer’s personal website. The letter closed with a reference to Lawson’s leadership role in CEEC and a link to CEEC’s website. Lawson thereby added CEEC’s weight to Sizer’s defence, and CEEC should be held accountable for its former chairman’s actions. It should follow the example of Christianity Explored Ministries and apologise for its involvement in the widespread evangelical toleration of Stephen Sizer.
Stephen Hofmeyr, currently one of CEEC’s highest-ranking officers, continues to endorse Sizer as a Christian leader. In 2023, Hofmeyr’s endorsement of Sizer was brought to the attention of John Dunnett (CEEC National Director). Instead of requiring Hofmeyr to stop endorsing Sizer, on account of his twelve-year ministry ban for antisemitic activity, Dunnett staunchly defended Hofmeyr. (The author’s correspondence with Dunnett is discussed later in this article.) Consider this from the perspective of the UK Jewish community: there can be no clearer proof of the willingness of evangelicals to tolerate anti-Jewish racism than Hofmeyr’s ongoing, CEEC-permitted endorsement of Sizer as a Christian leader.
Read more about CEEC’s role in the scandal here.
Vaughan Roberts
Vaughan Roberts served as the chair of the Proclamation Trust from 2009 to 2022. Thanks to that influential role, he had a measure of responsibility for the health of conservative evangelicalism in general. This was demonstrated at the Evangelical Ministry Assembly in 2019 when Roberts led the public reaction of conservative evangelicals to the news about Jonathan Fletcher’s history of abuse.
Due to Roberts’s position as a senior evangelical leader, in 2014 the author of this article asked Roberts to examine the allegations against Sizer, who had by that time been publicly criticised by the Council of Christians and Jews and four Jewish community organisations. Roberts was asked to focus his attention on evidence that Sizer was guilty of serious dishonesty, a disqualifying offence for a pastor. However, in spite of Jesus’s command to “watch out” for wolves in sheep’s clothing (Matthew 7:15–16), Roberts refused to provide any assistance. When he was asked to suggest someone who might be able to help, he refused to name a single person.
Last year, Roberts was shown a draft copy of an article about his role in the Sizer scandal. Instead of apologising, he repeated the reason he had given for refusing to help: “As I said to you in 2014, ‘I have no jurisdiction in this matter’”. But Roberts had no formal jurisdiction with respect to Jonathan Fletcher in 2019, and yet he still chose to play a leading role in the handling of that scandal. Evangelicalism is a movement that spans jurisdictions. There was plenty Roberts could have done to help in 2014, and so he bears some of the blame for evangelicalism’s toleration of Stephen Sizer. It’s bitterly disappointing that he still refuses to apologise.
Read more about Vaughan Roberts’s role in the Sizer scandal here.
Christianity Explored Ministries (CEM)
Key individual: Ian Roberts (previously Chief Executive, now Joint Chief Executive)
Stephen Sizer served for many years as a trainer for CEM. The same evidence of Sizer’s dishonesty that was sent to Vaughan Roberts was also sent to CEM’s board. What were the facts of this case? In 2012, the Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ) accused Sizer of disregarding warnings about a link he’d posted to an antisemitic website. After receiving the first warning, Sizer had left the link on his Facebook page for six weeks before finally removing it due to pressure from the Jewish Chronicle. The delay was so inexcusable that it was potentially career-ending. Sizer chose dishonesty as his method of defence. In a highly misleading blogpost, he implied that CCJ’s accusation was baseless. But it later came to light that Sizer had acknowledged receipt of the original warning, which proved CCJ’s allegation had been right all along.
The evidence demonstrating Sizer’s dishonesty was painstakingly laid out for Ian Roberts, CEM’s Chief Executive, prior to a board meeting on 29 September 2014. And yet the board chose not to take any action against Sizer, and Roberts even defended him. However, it later emerged that CEM’s board, six months after it had rejected the complaint, decided it would take action against Sizer after all, but secretly, without notifying the complainant.
If CEM had publicised its suspension of Sizer, it’s likely there would have been a much-needed domino effect, with other evangelical organisations also distancing themselves from Sizer and his church. As it was, the secret suspension provided no support whatsoever to the Jewish community.
CEM’s board made serious judicial mistakes in its dealings with Stephen Sizer. However, CEM should be commended for being the only evangelical organisation to issue a proper apology for its role in the Sizer scandal: “In retrospect, we could and should have been firmer in handling this issue. We express our collective regret and sorrow, and apologise to those affected that we did not act more decisively.”
Read more about CEM’s role in the Sizer scandal here.
Church Society
Key individuals: Lee Gatiss (Director); Andrew Towner (Chairman); Ros Clarke (Associate Director)
When Sizer was finally banned from ministry, David Hirsh (CEO of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism), observed that Sizer had been “tolerated and protected by many in the Church.” One group that chose to tolerate Sizer was Church Society—the only organisation that specifically represents conservative evangelicals in the Church of England. Church Society promptly addressed both the Smyth scandal and the Fletcher scandal, but it failed to address the Sizer scandal until 2020. When the scandal was at its height, in the years leading up to Sizer’s retirement in 2017, Church Society had nothing to say, even though Sizer was a former Church Society trustee and the most controversial conservative evangelical pastor in the Church of England.
Sizer’s activity was discussed in January 2015 in one of Church Society’s Facebook groups. That was the month when Sizer attracted national attention for spreading an antisemitic conspiracy theory about 9/11. One member of the group argued Sizer could say whatever he wished: “I stand by his right as both a citizen and a minister to ask these questions and make these suggestions.” This seems to have reflected Church Society’s view of the scandal at the time, because its director, Lee Gatiss, gave the comment a “like”. A “like” has the effect of signalling approval, whether or not approval is intended. For that reason, a British judge recently received a formal warning for “liking” an extremist post on LinkedIn, even though he claimed the “like” had been accidental.
The question at issue in the Facebook discussion was whether Sizer should be allowed to speak freely as a Christian leader. The issue is clarified if one imagines an evangelical pastor spreading poisonous anti-Black propaganda. Surely, in that parallel case, the pastor’s fellow evangelicals would quickly demand that something should be done to stop him bringing disgrace on the name of Christ. If that assumption is correct, Jewish people have every right to expect evangelicals to do the same when the racism is anti-Jewish. Tolerating one kind of racism, but not another, is hatefully prejudicial against the first of those mistreated ethnicities.
Church Society’s culpability in the Sizer scandal has since been compounded by its stubborn refusal to apologise to the Jewish community for its inaction.
Read more about Church Society’s role in the Sizer scandal here.
Inter-Varsity Press (IVP)
In October 2016, Inter-Varsity Press withdrew Sizer’s books from sale, returning the publishing rights to Sizer himself.
In contrast to earlier and later book withdrawals—books by, respectively, Peter O’Brien and Steve Timmis—IVP didn’t issue a public statement explaining its decision. But IVP’s disassociation from Sizer became public knowledge and was briefly mentioned in Evangelicals Now in January 2017 (true to form, the EN report failed to reference the accusations of antisemitism against Sizer). IVP’s silence about its decision was highly regrettable, and it could be compared to the equally regrettable silence of CEM when it suspended Sizer in 2015. In the absence of any statement from IVP, the door was left open to another publisher to reissue Sizer’s books without having to explain itself — which is exactly what happened.
Despite its problematic silence, IVP deserves credit as the only conservative evangelical organisation to take meaningful action against Sizer in the years preceding his January 2023 ministry ban.
Read more about IVP’s role in the Sizer scandal here.
ReNew
Key individuals: William Taylor (Chair of the ReNew Planning Team, 2013–22); Brian O’Donoghue (Pioneering and Operations Director)
ReNew represents conservative evangelical Anglicans both inside and outside the structures of the Church of England. In October 2017, Stephen Sizer attended a ReNew conference in Leeds. Attendance at the conference was subject to completion of an application form. ReNew is administered from St Helen’s Bishopsgate, and at that time it was chaired by William Taylor, the lead pastor of St Helen’s. Sizer’s presence at a 2017 conference overseen by Taylor demonstrates the longevity of Taylor’s view, expressed in 2012, that he sees “no justifiable grounds for breaking gospel partnership with Stephen”.
Sizer’s application to attend the 2017 conference was accepted despite his antisemitic conduct being widely reported; despite his conduct being publicly criticised by leading Jewish community groups; despite Sizer twice breaking an agreement with his diocese, causing his bishop to ban him from preaching, teaching, leading services, and social media activity; and despite Inter-Varsity Press withdrawing Sizer’s books in the preceding year.
Judging by Sizer’s cheerful account of his experience at the conference, it seems unlikely that he was challenged by any of the other attendees about his antisemitic track record. While evangelicals believe in forgiveness and grace in our relationships with fellow believers, these are contingent on repentance (Matthew 18:15–17). ReNew should have withheld fellowship from Sizer because of his lack of repentance. Sizer’s pleasant fraternising with conservative evangelicals at the 2017 ReNew conference is a snapshot of evangelicalism’s toleration of antisemitism. ReNew has never apologised for accepting Sizer into its fold.
Thus, with the single exception of IVP, none of these organisations or leaders took meaningful action against Sizer, and yet only Christianity Explored Ministries has issued a proper apology indicating repentance. The scandal is therefore unresolved and ongoing.
Three Phases of Church of England Discipline
As we have seen, the outcry against Sizer raised by Jewish evangelicals from 2011–22 failed to persuade any senior evangelical leaders to publicly condemn his antisemitism. However, the wider Jewish community was also calling on Christians to take action against Sizer, which led to three separate phases of Church of England discipline.
First, the Board of Deputies of British Jews — representing synagogues and other Jewish organisations — made a complaint against Sizer in 2012 via the Church of England’s Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM). This complaint was resolved in October 2013 by an agreement that required Sizer to let his online activity be monitored. But Sizer continued to maintain his innocence: “Without accepting the substance of the complaint, Dr Sizer regrets … .” And the Board continued to accuse Sizer of “statements that most of the [Jewish] community found utterly offensive, to the point of crossing the line into antisemitism,” and a “pattern of posting links to racist and antisemitic websites”. The Church of England therefore acted as a mediator finding a mutually acceptable way forward; it didn’t act as a judge determining the rights and wrongs of the case.
Second, Sizer was disciplined by his diocese in 2015 for his link to the antisemitic article “9/11: Israel Did It”. Bishop Andrew Watson publicly said of Sizer “By associating with or promoting subject matter which is either ambiguous in its motivation or (worse still) openly racist, he has crossed a serious line. I regard these actions as indefensible.” In response, Sizer gave “a solemn undertaking” not to write or speak on any theme relating to the Middle East and promised “I will stay within both the letter and the spirit of this undertaking, and — should I break it at any point while serving in any post in the diocese — will offer you my resignation.” [Emphasis added.] But Sizer went on to break this undertaking on two separate occasions. The lack of enforcement was near-comical: after Sizer’s first breach, in October 2016, the bishop warned him that any further breach would lead to “his tenure of office ending with immediate effect”. But when Sizer broke the agreement yet again, in February 2017, the bishop failed to uphold that very clear pledge. Sizer was permitted to remain in office (albeit with severe restrictions) until his scheduled farewell service that Easter.
The third phase of Church of England discipline happened after Sizer’s retirement. Like other retired Anglican vicars, Sizer remained answerable to a bishop, and in 2018 the Board of Deputies made a further complaint about him to the Church of England. This eventually led to a public disciplinary tribunal, which was held in May 2022. The tribunal found that on four occasions Sizer had “provoked and offended” the Jewish community, and on one of those four occasions — his link to the 9/11 article — he had engaged in antisemitic activity. As a result, Sizer received a twelve-year ministry ban. Evangelicals Now reported:
After years of controversy, Stephen Sizer has been found to have engaged in anti-Semitic behaviour by sharing a “deeply abhorrent” online article about 9–11, knowing it would be offensive to the Jewish community. And in a damning indictment of Sizer’s credibility, a bishop’s disciplinary Tribunal cast doubt on his honesty — rejecting parts of his evidence as “implausible and untrue”.
This third phase of discipline was a welcome demonstration of due process. However, as we have seen, it came about without any assistance from Sizer’s fellow conservative evangelical leaders.
Why Has Evangelicalism Fallen Short?
In the opinion of this author, the best explanation for British evangelicalism’s toleration of an antisemitic pastor is indifference—a heartless lack of concern for Jewish people. The additional tragedy of the situation is that biblical justice could have helped evangelicals overcome this heartlessness. If evangelicals had rigorously applied due process, they would have acted in the same way towards a leader guilty of antisemitism as they would towards a leader guilty of anti-Black racism or any other kind of disqualifying immorality.
In many of the instances outlined above, the allegations against Sizer were discussed at the highest organisational level. But they weren’t treated with the necessary judicial carefulness and diligence. That was evident from the lack of investigations or the inadequacy of investigations when they took place. Throughout the whole scandal, no evangelical organisation associated with Sizer produced a transparent report addressing the allegations on a point-by-point basis. The lack of faithful judicial leadership was also evident from the unbiblical reasoning used when leaders tried to explain their inaction.
One recent example of such reasoning comes from correspondence in 2023–24 with John Dunnett, National Director of the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC). Dunnett was asked to explain why Stephen Hofmeyr, CEEC’s treasurer and one of its five trustees, is continuing to endorse Sizer’s leadership of Peacemaker Trust. Sizer is the founder, leader, and sole full-time staff member of Peacemaker Trust, and its stated aim is “the advancement of the Christian religion”. Surely, now that Sizer has been banned by the Church of England, CEEC representatives such as Hofmeyr should consider Sizer unfit for Christian leadership?
When Dunnett was asked that question, he refused to accept that the discipline Sizer had received had implications outside of the Church of England. That’s correct from a denominational perspective, but it’s indefensible from an evangelical perspective. Evangelicalism spans denominational boundaries, so a leader disqualified by one denomination should be treated as unfit for Christian leadership everywhere, out of love for Christ’s people and concern for Christ’s name. Making an exception would only be justified if a particular denominational ban were considered undeserved, after evangelicals had independently assessed the case. But Dunnett didn’t express any disagreement with the Church of England’s verdict on Sizer.
To probe Dunnett’s suggestion that church discipline doesn’t apply outside its own denominational context, he was asked to consider a hypothetical situation in which “one of your trustees publicly supported Jonathan Fletcher in the event that he began leading Christian ministry outside the Church of England before the end of his ban.” Dunnett replied, “Reference to Jonathan Fletcher of course raises specific safeguarding issues which we do not believe have been determined as apposite to Stephen Sizer.” This implies that the only disqualifying sins that really count are the ones raising safeguarding issues. But the biblical requirements for Christian leadership (1 Timothy 3:1–13) aren’t restricted to safeguarding-related matters — as the National Director of CEEC ought to know.
CEEC’s shoulder-shrug in response to Hofmeyr’s endorsement of Sizer exemplifies evangelicalism’s judicial problems. Impartial consistency in response to any disqualifying sin (not just the ones with safeguarding implications) would have stopped Dunnett from defending Hofmeyr. Added to that, it’s hard to believe Dunnett would defend Hofmeyr if he were endorsing a leader banned for anti-Black activity instead of anti-Jewish activity. If that assumption is accurate, impartial consistency in response to different kinds of racism would also have kept Dunnett from defending Hofmeyr’s endorsement of Sizer.
If Hofmeyr won’t stop endorsing Sizer, the only judicially-acceptable options for CEEC are either to remove Hofmeyr from its council, or to issue a statement disagreeing—on the basis of detailed argumentation—with the tribunal’s verdict on Sizer. What isn’t acceptable is for CEEC to ignore the cross-denominational implications of a ministry ban. That should be immediately obvious to evangelicals, and it’s troubling that it’s not obvious to at least two of the six most senior leaders of CEEC. When a judicial verdict remains unchallenged, two principles must be upheld: a leader disqualified in one denomination shouldn’t be let loose elsewhere; and evangelicals aren’t free to pick and choose which disqualifying sins we take seriously. From the God-fearing perspective, CEEC is objectively in the wrong. What remains to be seen is whether it will do anything about it.
John Stevens’s Whitewashing of Evangelicalism: Five Critical Errors
Scandals remain unresolved until wrongdoing is fully admitted. Three of the organisations listed above (EN, CEM, and Church Society) have commented publicly on the Sizer scandal, but each has focussed on its own role. The only senior evangelical leader who’s ever discussed the scandal as a whole is John Stevens of FIEC. Rather than apologising to the UK Jewish community on behalf of British evangelicals or specifically the Gospel Partnerships movement — which he helped to develop — Stevens has prolonged and worsened the scandal by denying it exists.
Stevens set out his arguments in an email to the author in December 2022. He later criticised the author for choosing “not to engage with me personally or privately, as my private email offered him the opportunity to do”. However, his supposedly private email was copied to seven other recipients, including William Taylor of St Helen’s Bishopsgate and David Baker, the editor of Evangelicals Now. Moreover, on the same day that he sent his email, Stevens repeated his forceful defence of evangelicalism’s record on Sizer in a series of public comments on social media. So he plainly wasn’t seeking a private exchange of opinions prior to taking a position on the issue.
Shortly thereafter, Stevens posted his email on Facebook, where it remains publicly accessible. The core paragraphs are reproduced here:
If Stevens’s assessment were correct, this entire article would be misguided. But Stevens committed five major errors, each of which makes his position untenable.
1. Stevens Misrepresented the Sizer Tribunal’s Scope
In the email that became a public post, Stevens misrepresents the judicial scope of Sizer’s disciplinary tribunal. He says, “Most of the specific allegations of anti-semitic activity, including in your JoCA article, have been rejected by the Tribunal.”
The article he mentions, “A Lesser Bigotry? The UK Conservative Evangelical Response to Stephen Sizer’s Antisemitism”, was published in 2021 in the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism (JCA). It presents at least thirty examples of Sizer’s conduct as evidence of his antisemitism. The 2022 tribunal, on the other hand, only looked at eleven allegations. Out of those eleven, just four (E, G, H, and K in sections 119–149) overlapped with the JCA article’s allegations. In other words, only 13 percent of the JCA article’s allegations were considered by the tribunal.
The minimal overlap between the article and the tribunal is easily explained. The article’s authors didn’t know which allegations would be considered by the tribunal, since that wasn’t yet public information; and the tribunal couldn’t pivot its attention to the additional allegations in the JCA article because they were outside its remit. Stevens’s attempt to lump all the allegations together and claim the tribunal rejected them (bar Sizer’s 2015 Facebook link) is inexcusable. Stevens used a false claim to whitewash negligent evangelical leaders. It’s not at all surprising that others have apparently also experienced Stevens’s untrustworthy handling of judicial matters.
By declaring that most of the allegations in the JCA article had been rejected, Stevens avoided engaging with the leading academic journal on contemporary antisemitism. But each and every allegation in that article deserved Stevens’s careful consideration. The journal’s editor, Lesley Klaff, is an authority on the subject and wouldn’t have published the article if it hadn’t met the necessary standards of factual accuracy and rational assessment. The article was also peer-reviewed, which means it was independently approved by a second scholarly authority on antisemitism. If any of the article’s examples of Sizer’s behaviour hadn’t merited inclusion, either the editor or the peer reviewer would have required the removal of those examples prior to publication.
Stevens is obviously aware of the JCA article’s existence, but he has never engaged with it in point-by-point fashion—not even the section addressing his own role in the scandal. The only time he’s engaged with it (unless the author is mistaken) is when falsely stating that “Most of the specific allegations of anti-semitic activity, including in your JoCA article, have been rejected by the Tribunal.”
One final point should be made about the limited nature of the tribunal’s scope. The tribunal wasn’t allowed to consider the conduct that triggered the earliest phase of Church of England discipline. But, as noted above, that particular disciplinary process ended in a pragmatic agreement, without any verdict on the charges. Sizer continued to maintain his innocence; the Board of Deputies continued to publicly testify that he was guilty of antisemitism. Part of the content of that 2012 complaint was Sizer’s repeated posting of links to antisemitic websites. This is significant because evangelical leaders received parallel complaints in 2012 about Sizer’s links to antisemitic websites, and they did nothing meaningful in response. Stevens cannot claim that the Church of England has cleared Sizer of that offence, which leaves evangelical leaders liable for their negligent response.
Sizer’s links to antisemitic websites are a core component of the scandal. These were the links about which Mike Ovey privately said “If a member of my Faculty had made these links, I would have had no course, nor inclination, but to dismiss them.” Each link showed not only that Sizer had visited an antisemitic site but also that he wanted others to visit it too, and by 2012 he’d posted links to several different antisemitic sites (see the discussion earlier in this article). The refusal of the SEGP Steering Committee to take action over the links persuaded the author that previously-trusted leaders such as William Taylor, Brian O’Donoghue, and Richard Coekin couldn’t be relied on to handle judicial matters responsibly. They took no action in response to grievous racism; they gave no reason for their inaction; and, in the twelve years since, they’ve never apologised or indicated repentance. Perhaps it’s no surprise that John Stevens has ignored this egregious part of the scandal. What could he say in defence of those unrepentant leaders?
2. Stevens Sidestepped the Tribunal’s Additional Findings of “Unbecoming Conduct”
In his post about the Sizer tribunal, Stevens briefly notes that there were three additional findings against Sizer, on top of the finding of antisemitic activity: “In 3 of the 10 cases where Sizer’s conduct was not found to be antisemitic, he was found to have offended the Jewish community in a manner unbecoming of a vicar.” (Stevens unfortunately omits the word “provoked” from his summary. What the tribunal actually said was that Sizer “provoked and offended the Jewish community.”)
However, having noted those three additional findings of guilt, Stevens then sidesteps their importance: he doesn’t take them into account when assessing whether evangelical leaders were at fault for tolerating Sizer. That’s a grave mistake, because the phrase applied by the tribunal to those three incidents, “unbecoming conduct”, is the Church of England’s technical term for conduct deserving church discipline. A pastor can be asked by a bishop to resign due to “unbecoming conduct”, with no further public details deemed necessary.
Before the 2022 tribunal, Sizer had never been disciplined for those three additional offences. They establish that even if the 2015 Facebook link is set aside, Sizer had a record of provoking the Jewish people in ways deserving church discipline. Therefore, even when, for the sake of argument, the tribunal is treated as the reliable last word on Sizer, Stevens’s attempted whitewashing of his fellow evangelical leaders fails to clear them of negligence. They tolerated a pastor who, according to the tribunal, deserved to be disciplined for his provocative actions towards the Jewish people.
3. Stevens Treated Church of England Discipline as Trustworthy and Sufficient
Stevens’s defence of evangelicalism’s record on Sizer can be summarised as follows: the Church of England tribunal only upheld one of the antisemitism charges, and Sizer had been disciplined for that offence at the time, so there was nothing evangelical leaders should have done differently. We’ve now seen that there are two powerful counter-arguments to that position: the tribunal’s limited scope; and its additional findings of unbecoming conduct, which Stevens notes but then fails to address.
There’s another problem with Stevens’s position, a theological problem: it depends on the assumption that the Church of England’s judicial system is reliable. That theologically-unacceptable assumption is Stevens’s third critical error. To explore it fully, this section will be subdivided into three points.
3a) The Church of England Cannot Be Trusted with Spiritual Justice
We instinctively respect the legal apparatus of Sizer’s tribunal (lawyers for both sides, expert witnesses, and a KC in the chair), and so we typically view the verdict of any such tribunal as the last word on a case. Generally speaking, that’s a reasonable attitude to have towards Britain’s judicial system. But Sizer’s tribunal had the job of administering spiritual justice, the kind of justice in view in 1 Corinthians 6:1–8, which addresses non-criminal allegations within the church. According to Paul, spiritual justice should be overseen by “the saints” (Bible-believing Christians) rather than “the unrighteous” (verse 1). And, for that reason, the Church of England’s version of spiritual justice is untrustworthy. It’s overseen by the ruling hierarchy of the Church of England, which doesn’t uphold the Bible’s teaching.
The Church of England might deliver justice in the kind of cases in view in 1 Corinthians 6, but believers shouldn’t expect it to do so (this is a significant disadvantage of doing ministry within the Church of England). The situation is reversed when the saints are in charge of spiritual justice: in such circumstances believers should expect justice, although from time to time, sad to say, the saints might not deliver it. In short, the impressive appearance of Church of England disciplinary proceedings mustn’t lead evangelicals into unquestioning submission and deference. We walk by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7).
To be clear: in the opinion of this author, the twelve-year ministry ban handed to Sizer by the Church of England tribunal was a welcome penalty. As has just been said, sometimes “the unrighteous” can deliver justice. And cross-denominational partnership requires evangelicals to treat Sizer’s ban with respect: either honouring it or, if they wish to disregard it, explaining with detailed argumentation why they think it’s wrong. But the idea held by Stevens, that the tribunal is the definitive guide to Sizer’s overall conduct (and, therefore, to evangelical leaders’ liability for tolerating Sizer), is unacceptable because of the tribunal’s lack of spiritual standing.
The Sizer case provides at least one clear example of the way in which oversight by “the unrighteous” can warp judicial findings. The tribunal’s most contentious opinion was based on unbiblical conjecture: “the Tribunal does not conclude that the Respondent is antisemitic by nature.” Bible-believing Christians don’t speculate about people’s hearts; we echo Solomon’s words to God: “you, you only, know the hearts of all the children of mankind” (1 Kings 8:39; see also 1 Samuel 16:7). More will be said below about that not-antisemitic-by-nature claim. The point here is that it demonstrates the trouble with unrighteous oversight of a case belonging in the 1 Corinthians 6 category.
3b) Denominational Discipline Isn’t Necessarily Binding on Evangelicals
Perhaps Stevens would say that cross-denominational partnership required him to accept the tribunal’s verdict. He argued along those lines earlier in the Sizer scandal, saying, in 2020, “Stephen Sizer was subject to an inquiry and subsequent disciplinary measures by his diocese, who were the competent disciplinary body.” Stevens’s use of the legal term “competent” shows he thought the diocese’s rulings were authoritative and should be treated as such by Christians inside and outside the Church of England. A similar argument was made earlier in this article, when CEEC was criticised for disregarding Sizer’s ministry ban.
However, as acknowledged in the discussion about CEEC, cross-denominational partnership shouldn’t tie evangelicals’ hands. It’s legitimate for evangelicals to reject a disciplinary verdict, so long as they publicly and transparently explain their thinking (which CEEC hasn’t done). For that reason, Stevens wasn’t inescapably obliged to accept the Church of England’s ruling on Sizer.
The difference, then, between Stevens and the author on the reliability of the tribunal is as follows: Stevens evidently saw it as a trustworthy means of settling the Sizer case once and for all, while the author saw it as an untrustworthy judicial exercise that happened to issue a deservedly severe penalty. This isn’t a minor difference of opinion. If the tribunal had found Sizer innocent, Stevens would have accepted its verdict without independently examining the case (in his words, evangelicals “were in no position to adjudicate”). The author, in contrast, would have rejected an innocent verdict, explaining all over again why Sizer was guilty in light of the Bible’s teaching. It bears repeating that the judiciary of a largely-apostate denomination mustn’t be treated by evangelicals as the final authority in 1 Corinthians 6 cases.
3c) Church of England Discipline Is Inadequate Without Evangelical Endorsement
Stevens argues that the discipline handed out to Sizer in 2015 was sufficient: “The activity [the tribunal] did find to be antisemitic was not ignored, but was publicly acknowledged as such and led to church discipline.” Earlier in his post Stevens similarly says, “The one anti-semitic activity was already fully identified as such in the statement made by the Bishop of Guildford in 2015 which imposed discipline on Rev Sizer.” In other words, Stevens thinks the judicial outcome back in 2015—when Sizer was disciplined by his bishop but not by any of the evangelical organisations associated with him—was an acceptable state of affairs.
But that argument is seriously misguided for a very simple reason: evangelicals, including Anglican evangelicals, do not trust the Church of England’s hierarchy unless its actions are endorsed by evangelicals. This is a well-justified attitude in view of the preceding points, 3a and 3b. The denomination’s long drift away from orthodox teaching has understandably created an us-and-them mentality, where the “us” are Anglican evangelicals, and the “them” are the archdeacons, bishops, and archbishops who so often seek to thwart conservative evangelicalism. So when evangelicals, including Sizer’s congregation, saw their own organisations (the South East Gospel Partnership, Christianity Explored, and others) failing to endorse the Bishop of Guildford’s discipline and choosing instead to stick by Sizer, they naturally concluded that Sizer was the victim of unjust or overzealous treatment by the Church of England hierarchy.
It’s not hard to find an example of this mindset. After the tribunal’s verdict, CCVW member Tim Unwin publicly defended Sizer on social media, saying, “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 has served as the church’s Parish Safeguarding Representative. His pro-Sizer, anti-hierarchy attitude is evidently widespread at CCVW, because the church continued to act as Sizer’s booster after the 2015 disciplining. In 2016, for example, CCVW gave Sizer £6,000 “to support his work overseas”. And CCVW even continued supporting Sizer financially after the additional discipline handed out to Sizer in 2017.
In order for Sizer’s congregation, and evangelicals more widely, to respond properly to his misconduct, it was essential for evangelical leaders and their organisations to publicly endorse the 2015 discipline. John Stevens and other leaders were personally urged to do so (see the email excerpt below), but they all failed to take the opportunity.
EN briefly reported the 2015 discipline, but didn’t explain the antisemitic overtones of the 9/11 conspiracy theory that Sizer had promoted; nor did EN say that Sizer had already been accused of antisemitism by Jewish community groups before he promoted that conspiracy theory. Without that context, readers lacked the tools needed for assessing what had happened. Indeed, given that EN’s report concluded with Sizer’s apology and clarification, readers would have been expected to forgive the incident and move on. That would have been the appropriate evangelical response to a seemingly isolated and seemingly unintentional offence. What readers couldn’t have known—due to EN’s long-standing refusal to report antisemitism allegations against Sizer—was that the incident wasn’t isolated, thereby indicating that it wasn’t unintentional. For all those reasons, EN’s report of the 2015 discipline had the effect of protecting Sizer, rather than exposing his activity to serious assessment.
Therefore, the Church of England’s disciplining of Sizer in 2015 doesn’t excuse evangelical leaders’ inaction; on the contrary, it shows just how entrenched their toleration of Sizer had become. Evangelical leaders had a wide-open opportunity in 2015 to show they did not stand with Sizer. The SEGP Steering Committee could have excluded CCVW from the Gospel Partnerships network; CEM could have announced that Sizer would no longer serve as one of its trainers; EN could have engaged seriously with Sizer’s track record, following the example set at that time by an author writing for the American publication First Things; Church Society could have issued a public statement, as it would later do in response to the Smyth and Fletcher scandals; and CCVW’s churchwardens could have (among other possible responses) apologised to the Jewish community on behalf of their church. None of those actions were taken. None of the leaders of British evangelicalism publicly endorsed the Church of England’s 2015 disciplining of Sizer. They remained silent because they found Sizer tolerable.
4. Stevens Mistakenly Anticipated a Lenient Penalty
On another occasion, with another case in view, Stevens himself would likely agree that anything done by the Church of England’s ruling hierarchy should be treated by evangelicals with healthy suspicion. Indeed, just three days before he sent his whitewashing email, Stevens had demonstrated his independence by trenchantly criticising a group of bishops who had called for the Church of England to allow same-sex marriages. Why, then, did he receive the tribunal’s verdict on Sizer with such uncritical submission? The explanation seems to lie in the timing of Stevens’s whitewashing post.
The post was written between the tribunal’s verdict (6 December 2022) and its penalty (30 January 2023). During that in-between period, it was still possible to think Sizer might receive a light penalty. And that’s what Stevens evidently anticipated, on the basis of the tribunal’s statement in paragraph 115: “the Tribunal does not conclude that the Respondent is antisemitic by nature.” Stevens said this statement was “likely to matter to the penalty the Tribunal imposes.”
Stevens highlighted paragraph 115 in a Facebook comment on 15 December 2022; during the 16 December episode of the FIEC podcast, when he claimed paragraph 115 was “the crucial paragraph”; and in his 20 December Facebook post, which said, “In the light of the Tribunal findings, which definitively state that Stephen is not anti-semitic or racist (para 115) … .” On all those occasions, Stevens used paragraph 115 to suggest that Sizer wasn’t an antisemite, thereby absolving his fellow leaders for tolerating him. At that point in time, when Stevens was anticipating a light penalty, the tribunal was extremely useful in his eyes.
Seven weeks later, however, the tribunal issued its severe penalty. By banning Sizer from ministry for twelve years — two years longer than the ban imposed on Jonathan Fletcher — the tribunal showed that paragraph 115 hadn’t been as crucial as Stevens had claimed. The statement accompanying the penalty cited the additional findings of unbecoming conduct, which Stevens had failed to take sufficiently into account: “the Tribunal found that between 2006 and 2018 [Sizer] pushed the boundaries beyond what was acceptable conduct for an ordained minister, and … showed a lack of sensitivity to the Jewish community.” So the tribunal no longer provided cover for past evangelical inaction, and Stevens immediately fell silent.
Much could be said about Stevens’s use of paragraph 115. In brief, someone found guilty of antisemitic activity can rightly be described as an antisemite, just as someone guilty of adultery can be called an adulterer and someone guilty of murder can be called a murderer. Therefore, Stevens made a serious mistake when he said “the Tribunal rejected the allegation that Rev Sizer was an antisemite.” By dropping the tribunal’s qualifying words “by nature”, Stevens gave a misleading summary of the verdict as a whole. In truth, the tribunal found that Sizer was an antisemite; the tribunal also expressed the opinion that he wasn’t “antisemitic by nature.”
However, the argument here isn’t just that Stevens mishandled one paragraph to suit his purposes. The argument is that Stevens’s entire response to the tribunal was driven by his partisan desire to absolve evangelicalism. At first he embraced the tribunal’s verdict, publicising it and treating it with unquestioning deference—seen, for example, in his description of its findings as “definitive”. But then, when the January 2023 penalty didn’t fit his whitewashing narrative, he became uncharacteristically silent. The contrast displays a lack of impartiality.
The announcement of Sizer’s long ban, which must have given Stevens a considerable jolt, offered him an opportunity to adjust his position. He could have admitted that his championing of paragraph 115 as “the crucial paragraph” had evidently been misguided. He could have acknowledged that evangelical leaders must, after all, have a case to answer, given the severity of the punishment issued to a pastor they had tolerated. That’s how an impartial leader would have reacted. But the twelve-year ban wasn’t useful for whitewashing evangelicalism, so Stevens simply ignored it, retreating into silence.
Stevens’s conduct fits the thesis of this two-part article: British evangelicalism’s senior leaders haven’t applied due process, such as impartiality, when dealing with scandals.
5. Stevens Faithlessly Viewed Evangelicals as Incapable of Judging
The fifth critical error made by Stevens is his assertion that evangelicals “were in no position” to judge the case against Sizer:
“The fact that it required a 5-day legal hearing with multiple expert witnesses to reach this conclusion demonstrates that evangelical organisations without such resources, and leaders with little information other than social media allegations, were in no position to adjudicate these claims.”
To begin with, Stevens is wrong to portray the Sizer case as unusually difficult because of the nature of the tribunal: “it required a 5-day legal hearing with multiple expert witnesses to reach this conclusion”. A legal hearing in the form of a tribunal, with provision for expert witnesses, is a standard step in the Church of England’s disciplinary process (see the flow chart below). In other words, tribunals are used regardless of the complexity or simplicity of the case.
The Church of England’s use of tribunals is far from unique. It’s an institution that controls a lifelong professional qualification. Similar institutions, such as medical and legal bodies, routinely use tribunals to resolve contested cases. The use of a tribunal doesn’t indicate anything exceptional about Sizer’s case.
Stevens, who chairs a law firm, undoubtedly understands this. And yet, in order to whitewash his fellow evangelical leaders, he chose to give the false impression that the Sizer case must have been particularly difficult because a tribunal was used. It seems clear that Stevens was unscrupulously reaching for any and every argument, regardless of factual merit, that might persuade his readers that evangelicals were innocent of tolerating antisemitism.
But the categorical claim Stevens goes on to make is even more problematic: “evangelical organisations without such resources, and leaders with little information other than social media allegations, were in no position to adjudicate these claims.” Once again, Stevens has little regard for the ninth commandment: it’s untrue that evangelical leaders had “little information other than social media allegations”. He seems to have forgotten that he has himself just mentioned an academic article about the Sizer scandal, complete with 252 footnotes citing well-respected websites and national newspapers. Evangelical leaders were always shown carefully-substantiated information about Sizer’s wrongdoing, and Stevens is well aware of that.
However, the main point of contention here is Stevens’s conclusion that evangelicals “were in no position to adjudicate these claims.” Evangelical leaders have a God-given responsibility to do precisely what Stevens claims they couldn’t do. Criminal misconduct should be reported to the police, but allegations of non-criminal misconduct among God’s people must be faithfully handled by Bible-believing leaders in accordance with the principles of biblical justice (these are discussed in the introduction to this two-part article). Jesus exhorts his followers to “Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them” (Matthew 7:15–16). There are no exceptions given for hard cases. In fact, given Old Testament precedents (e.g., Exodus 18:25–26 and 1 Kings 3:10–28), the hardest cases should be taken on by the most senior leaders.
It’s worth noting that William Taylor, Stevens’s ally, certainly didn’t consider himself “in no position” to adjudicate Sizer’s case when he investigated Sizer’s conduct and concluded there were “no justifiable grounds for breaking gospel partnership with Stephen or with Christ Church Virginia Water.” Taylor’s investigation was inadequate, his conclusion was wrong, and his refusal to revisit that 2012 verdict is indefensible, but at least he was willing to make a judgment. Stevens’s argument about evangelical incapability in the Sizer case is contradicted by Taylor’s willingness to conduct an investigation. But that’s something Stevens either failed to notice or chose not to address.
Relatedly, Stevens also hasn’t addressed CEM’s willingness first to suspend Sizer, and then to apologise for failing to go further: “In retrospect, we could and should have been firmer in handling this issue. We express our collective regret and sorrow, and apologise to those affected that we did not act more decisively.” According to Stevens’s logic, CEM was wrong both to suspend Sizer and also to apologise for not doing more, because prior to the tribunal “evangelical organisations … were in no position to adjudicate these claims.”
The problem with Stevens’s standpoint can be crystallised into one question: if senior evangelical leaders were in no position to adjudicate claims of racism in their movement, who was in a suitable position to judge those claims? As we’ve seen, the Church of England’s leaders weren’t in a suitable position, because in many cases they themselves are the kind of false prophets whom Jesus warns against. Who, then, was best placed to say “Sizer is a trustworthy leader of God’s people” or “Sizer is guilty of disqualifying sin” if not senior evangelical leaders such as Stevens himself? Readers of this article who belong to an ethnic minority should ask themselves whether they agree with Stevens that evangelical leaders were “in no position” to take action against a Gospel Partnerships pastor who publicly posted links to at least eight different racist websites.
Leaders never get everything right. So, in many situations, the real test is whether they demonstrate swift, wholehearted repentance when they’re shown to be in the wrong. The widespread, ongoing lack of repentance in the Sizer scandal, some eighteen months after Sizer received his ministry ban, is highly problematic. It demonstrates the serious inadequacy of the leaders of the evangelical organisations in question. Stevens’s unjustified whitewashing of his fellow leaders, based on multiple falsehoods and anti-biblical reasoning, certainly calls into question his own suitability for high evangelical office.
Why Focus on Stevens?
To some readers, it may seem unfair to focus on Stevens. Prior to 2022, he himself hadn’t been a major figure in the scandal (nor had he been blameless, as can be seen from the JCA article on the scandal, which discusses his role). But by attempting to exonerate his fellow evangelicals, Stevens has made himself one of the scandal’s central figures.
One indication of the influence of Stevens’s whitewashing post is this approving comment from Simon Vibert, Sizer’s successor at Christ Church Virginia Water (CCVW):
CCVW, which is implicated in Sizer’s antisemitic conduct, has adamantly resisted all calls for public repentance. Stevens’s post offered a kind of fig leaf for CCVW’s unrepentant attitude. A senior leader such as Stevens has that power — a single Facebook post can bring about repentance or prolong unrepentance. All of this shows how important it is for high-level leaders to respond with the utmost carefulness to serious allegations. However, most regrettably, John Stevens has objectively failed in that duty.
Aside from Simon Vibert, the main beneficiary of Stevens’s whitewashing has been William Taylor. The JCA article said, in 2021, “It is difficult to avoid concluding that the individual who bears most responsibility for the failure of British conservative evangelicals to take action against Dr. Sizer is Rev. Taylor.” By whitewashing evangelicalism as a whole, Stevens was defending the worst offender in the handling of the scandal: Taylor, Stevens’s ministry ally. Thus, in two separate scandals, the Fletcher scandal and the Sizer scandal, Stevens has come to Taylor’s aid in biblically-illegitimate ways. Evangelical partnership across different denominations is usually something to be thankful for, but the cooperation between Stevens and Taylor has been seriously detrimental in two major evangelical scandals.
Toxic Leadership Flows Downstream
Through their involvement in the Sizer and Fletcher scandals, Taylor and Stevens have shown they cannot be trusted to respond justly to evangelical wrongdoing. What’s more, their toxic irresponsibility has flowed downstream to less senior leaders, with the result that other scandals remain unaddressed.
One example should be enough to demonstrate the point. In 2021, Church Society published a report by its director, Lee Gatiss, about Michael and Kate Andreyev, who were associated with Church Society via their parish church. John Stevens personally indicated his endorsement of Gatiss’s report, and Brian O’Donoghue, William Taylor’s de facto spokesman, also indicated his approval. Yet the report was a broken promise based on a lie.
Andrew Towner, the Chair of Church Society’s Council, had written to Kate Andreyev in February 2021 to address what he described as her “complaint against Church Society”. He told her, “We recognise the need for an independent external investigation to give full weight to your allegations, and are working to make this happen.” He also assured her that Church Society could be trusted to act in accordance with the highest moral standards:
Yet without telling the Andreyevs, Towner went on to pursue an entirely different course of action. There was no independent investigation. Six months after Towner’s letter, on 1 August 2021, Church Society sent Gatiss’s report to the Andreyevs. They immediately replied: “having read through the document, it contains many inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and distortions throughout. We therefore regard it as defamatory.” But Church Society paid no attention and published the report on its website on the following day.
This was very evidently a broken promise. The seemingly heartfelt assurances Towner had made to Kate Andreyev turned out to be nauseatingly meaningless. But on top of that, Church Society resorted to an outright lie in order to explain its failure to deliver the promised investigation. In his report, Gatiss claimed the Andreyevs had “publicly stated that any external investigation should not be commissioned or paid for by [Church Society]”. But there was no factual basis for Gatiss’s claim. A Church Society member, Simon Tomkins, personally contacted five of the organisation’s leaders to ask them how they might defend Gatiss’s use of this falsehood. When none of them could give an adequate answer, he resigned from Church Society.
However, in the culture overseen by John Stevens and William Taylor, it’s not considered necessary for Christian leaders to demonstrate basic Christian conduct such as telling the truth. The only thing that counts is orthodox doctrine. Hence, Lee Gatiss has been warmly embraced by the FIEC as a “friend in the Church of England”. Meanwhile, Michael and Kate Andreyev have never received the redress they are so clearly owed.
True Christianity requires a combination of orthodoxy (right teaching) and orthopraxy (right living). Of course, all of us will find that we do continue to sin, which is why repentance is an essential feature of Christian living. Just as plants emit oxygen, real Christians emit repentance. When repentance is absent, so is genuine Christianity. As Augustine warned the newly baptised, “Beware of imitating the bad faithful … those who are faithful in their confession of faith, but unfaithful, unbelievers in the bad lives they lead.” The culture overseen by John Stevens and William Taylor has allowed this kind of unfaithfulness to proliferate.
Conclusion: Justice for the People of God
This two-part article has argued that conservative evangelicals have repeatedly failed to apply biblical due process when assessing serious allegations. The widespread toleration of Sizer’s antisemitism is further evidence of evangelicalism’s problem with due process. Allegations of wrongdoing were treated as an inconvenient distraction from gospel work and were therefore ignored or given minimal attention. When action was taken, it was secretive. Even IVP failed to publicly explain its good decision to withdraw Sizer’s books. If only evangelicals had patiently and carefully applied biblical due process, Sizer’s conduct might never have spread beyond his own actions into a wider evangelical antisemitism scandal.
The nature of evangelicalism’s scandalous justice can be captured by a pair of contrasting quotations. In 2012, after conducting an inadequate investigation into Sizer’s conduct, William Tayor concluded that he had “no justifiable grounds for breaking gospel partnership with Stephen or with Christ Church Virginia Water.” Ten years later, however, John Stevens argued that evangelicals had been “in no position to adjudicate”. This “heads we win; tails we win” approach to justice has characterised the entire Sizer scandal. The absence of due process, humble self-examination, and contrite repentance is grossly unbiblical.
It’s generally agreed that in the past 70 years evangelicals have made excellent progress in academic theology. In the first half of the 20th century, British evangelicals were not known for rigorous theological labours, but now our work is just as academically robust as that of liberal theologians. The time has come, after the Smyth, Fletcher, and Sizer scandals, to make similar progress in our understanding and application of justice.
The great temptation in matters of justice is to make assumptions of guilt or innocence based on pre-existing preference — respecting this person while disliking that one — without giving close, time-consuming attention to the details of a case. To continue the comparison with theological standards, assuming guilt or innocence on the basis of personal preference is like preaching a sermon on a passage without first carrying out careful exegesis. Justice often hinges on questions needing as much painstaking attention as an exegetical task such as analysing the variant texts of a disputed passage (Mark 16, for example, or John 8), to see what can be said with confidence about the original text. British evangelicals have shown we can rise to testing exegetical challenges, but — following the Smyth, Fletcher, and Sizer scandals — the same can’t be said when it comes to judicial challenges.
One reason why Christian leaders must learn to implement biblical due process is because Scripture forbids us, as a general rule, from using secular law to obtain justice in non-criminal disputes with fellow believers (1 Corinthians 6:1–8). In those situations we have nowhere to turn for justice other than our spiritual leaders. Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 6 establishes the principle that in such cases Christians are capable of judging ourselves and should do so. And yet the evidence set out in this article should persuade British evangelicals that some of our current leaders cannot be trusted to deliver justice to their fellow Christians. In particular, the unholy alliance between William Taylor and John Stevens has produced objectively unjustified whitewashings: of Taylor and O’Donoghue in relation to the Fletcher scandal, and of Taylor (among others) in relation to the the Sizer scandal. We can have little confidence that due process will be honoured in any future scandal while Taylor and Stevens remain at the wheel.
There’s wonderful comfort in knowing that all wrongs will be righted on the great day of God’s justice (Psalm 96:10–13). But God’s future judging shouldn’t make believers passive in the face of wrongdoing in this fallen world. Instead, knowing that we too will be judged by Christ “for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad” (2 Corinthians 5:10), we should condemn what is evil and unjust, and speak up for what is right and true.
Author’s Note, October 2024
Following the publication of this article in July 2024, I’ve edited it for clarity and removed a minor error. At the current time, three months after publication, none of the leaders or organisations criticised in this article have engaged with its claims.
