Vaughan Roberts, Christianity Explored Ministries, and the Stephen Sizer Antisemitism Scandal
In 2014, both Vaughan Roberts and Christianity Explored Ministries were shown the same evidence of Stephen Sizer’s misconduct. Neither Vaughan nor CEM took action in response.
This article explores the role of Vaughan Roberts and Christianity Explored Ministries in the Sizer scandal. Vaughan and CEM are considered together because they were given the same evidence about Sizer in the same year. Vaughan will be referred to by his first name in order to distinguish him from Ian Roberts, Chief Executive of CEM.
In the eyes of the author, Vaughan is a good pastor and CEM is a good organisation. The point of this article isn’t to discredit Vaughan or CEM, the point is to show that they didn’t act in a biblically faithful way when presented with evidence of Stephen Sizer’s antisemitism and dishonesty. It’s necessary to bring this to people’s attention because it supports a wider argument: the senior leaders of British evangelicalism have shown they cannot be trusted in their handling of judicial matters (i.e., their handling of serious complaints warranting detailed responses). That’s the reason why British evangelicals have lurched from one scandal to another, with at least one truly vile scandal still completely unaddressed.
Vaughan Roberts
In 2014, Vaughan Roberts was asked to help with efforts to address Sizer’s misconduct. Vaughan was at that time the director of the Proclamation Trust (PT). He was informed that the Board of Deputies of British Jews, representing 138 synagogues, had publicly accused Sizer of antisemitism. However, given the possibility that Vaughan might say he wasn’t qualified to adjudicate a dispute over antisemitism, he was instead asked to consider evidence that Sizer was guilty of dishonesty, a sin that is potentially disqualifying for a pastor.
One indication of the seriousness of dishonesty — as distinct from perjury — is that, under UK law, a public official caught in a serious lie can be charged with misconduct in a public office, which is an imprisonable offence.
The Dishonesty Allegation
The dishonesty allegation against Sizer sprang from his October 2011 Facebook link to the racist website “The Ugly Truth”. In November 2011, a complaint was made to Sizer’s bishop about the Facebook link. The bishop forwarded the complaint to Sizer, along with some cautionary words, and he received a reply from Sizer on the same day. However, instead of deleting the link immediately, Sizer left it on his Facebook page. He only deleted the link after coming under pressure from the Jewish Chronicle in January 2012.
When the Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ) discovered that Sizer hadn’t immediately removed the link when first contacted by his bishop, he was suddenly in a career-threatening position. Not only had he posted a link to a racist website, he had also knowingly left that link on his Facebook page. Sizer’s delay in removing the link was highlighted by CCJ in a fiercely critical March 2012 press release that included the accurate allegation “Mr Sizer was alerted to the antisemitic nature of the website in November”.
Sizer chose attack as the best form of defence. He dishonestly gave the impression that the November alert had never happened:
The substantiating evidence against Sizer was very clear: later in 2012, the bishop’s chaplain confirmed in writing that the bishop had emailed Sizer in November 2011 about the link in question. He also revealed that Sizer had replied on the same day. That reply to the bishop was eventually made public via a CofE disciplinary process. Sizer had said, “I am embarrassed and sorry that I have caused you this concern. I will be more careful in what I allow to be posted on my Facebook. I normally take great care to avoid material that promotes racism or violence”. Six months later, in his May 2012 response to CCJ (reproduced above), Sizer dishonestly gave the impression that the November 2011 back-and-forth with his bishop had never happened.
Vaughan’s Response
The point of bringing this evidence to Vaughan’s attention in 2014 was to make it as easy as possible for him to assess Sizer’s character. If a wolf in sheep’s clothing reveals his wolfishness in more than one way, it’s sensible for his opponents to point out the example of wolfishness that is most easily detected. But Vaughan refused to look at the evidence of Sizer’s dishonesty. He was asked to suggest someone else who might look at the evidence, but he refused to suggest a single name. During the correspondence, which remained respectful on both sides, it was pointed out to Vaughan that his response wasn’t in keeping with the New Testament’s call for vigilance regarding Christian leaders (Matthew 7:15). But he remained unwilling to act.
Vaughan’s stated rationale for not taking action was that he didn’t have “direct responsibility” in the matter. In his correspondence he stressed “authority” and “jurisdiction”. But in 2014 Vaughan had reached a level of leadership in UK conservative evangelicalism that gave him a measure of responsibility for the health of the whole movement. That was why the Jewish evangelical corresponding with him was seeking his help. If evangelicalism is a movement uniting organisations, churches, and denominations—and the author of this article passionately believes it is — then its senior leaders ought to be concerned, for the sake of Christ’s glory, about what is happening outside of their personal chain of command.
Alarm bells ought to have rung for Vaughan when the Board of Deputies of British Jews, an organisation with a long and highly-respected history, singled out a conservative evangelical pastor for severe public criticism. The dishonesty allegation gave Vaughan an easy way to assess Sizer’s character, and with his large staff team and study assistant, he certainly had the resources to see whether or not Sizer had a case to answer. By refusing to consider any of the allegations, Vaughan demonstrated an overly narrow view of responsibility that did not match up with his seniority in evangelicalism at that time. He failed to treat scandalous evangelical misconduct with the seriousness it deserved.
What Could Vaughan Have Done?
Some readers might wonder what action Vaughan could have gone on to take, if, instead of ignoring the evidence, he’d studied it, sought out Sizer’s side of the story, and ultimately concluded that Sizer was guilty of serious dishonesty. One of the privileges of senior leadership is that it grants access, almost immediately, to a wide range of other leaders. It’s hardly exaggerating to say that any conservative evangelical in Britain would quickly return a phone call from the Director of the Proclamation Trust. Vaughan could, therefore, have easily liaised with the leaders of the evangelical organisations with which Sizer was associated, and that would have created opportunities for appropriate action.
To give just one example, in February 2015 Christianity Explored Ministries secretly suspended Sizer from his role with the organisation (an action discussed later in this article). If Vaughan had by that time raised urgent concerns with CEM about Sizer, CEM would have been much more likely to publicise the suspension, which would have made an enormous difference to the perception of Sizer among evangelicals.
If it still seems unreasonable to blame Vaughan for inaction, consider that Dr Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, had no direct institutional authority over C.J. Mahaney, the former president of Sovereign Grace Ministries. Despite that, Mohler expressed his concerns about Mahaney in a public statement released in February 2019. Mahaney had already been the subject of public criticism, but Mohler was the first senior evangelical to give high-level validity to that criticism. He chose to use his power as a senior evangelical leader for the good of the movement, to the glory of Christ.
As it happens, Vaughan himself, in his role as the Director of PT, benefitted greatly from Mohler’s intervention. Three days later, Mahaney withdrew from his speaking engagement at PT’s 2019 Evangelical Ministry Assembly (EMA). Prior to Mohler’s statement, Mahaney was already a controversial figure, and his presence at EMA would inevitably have led to protests like those that forced his withdrawal from T4G in 2018. (It had been naive, at best, for PT to announce Mahaney as a headline speaker after that T4G withdrawal.) It was at the 2019 EMA that the Jonathan Fletcher scandal was first publicly addressed. Al Mohler’s intervention spared Vaughan the nightmarish problem of navigating the Fletcher scandal at a conference where C.J. Mahaney, heavily implicated in a separate scandal, was one of the headline speakers. Vaughan avoided all the difficulties Mahaney’s visit would have generated, thanks to Mohler’s bold willingness to shine a light on evangelical conduct outside his own chain of command — the very thing Vaughan has always refused to do in the Sizer case.
Assessing Vaughan’s Negligence
This article is the first time that Vaughan has been publicly criticised for his inaction in the Sizer scandal, and he was shown a copy in advance. Very disappointingly, he did not make use of the opportunity to apologise, but instead quoted his own earlier words, “As I said to you in 2014, ‘I have no jurisdiction in this matter’”, thereby doubling down on the position he took while the scandal was unfolding.
It’s certainly true that Vaughan’s lack of jurisdiction makes him less blameworthy than others. But Vaughan refused a personal request for help, along with carefully assembled evidence, and that request, in the sovereignty of God, had the effect of drawing him into the circle of the Sizer scandal. It bears repeating that Vaughan refused to provide any help whatsoever — not even suggesting a suitable alternative name to contact.
Lack of jurisdiction is only a defence if it would be morally wrong for leaders to intervene in a scandal outside their own church or organisation. Was it morally wrong for Al Mohler to draw attention to the allegation that C. J. Mahaney had failed to report sexual abuse? Was it morally wrong for Warren Throckmorton, a Christian professor in Pennsylvania, to sound an early alarm about Mark Driscoll, who was 2,500 miles away in Seattle? Or for the late Revd Dr Mike Ovey of Oak Hill College to say of Stephen Sizer’s links to antisemitic sites, “If a member of my faculty had made these links, I would have had no course, nor inclination, but to dismiss them”— and to urge his correspondent to show that comment to his employer? In the view of this author, Mohler, Throckmorton, and Ovey behaved rightly, and lack of jurisdiction should not be treated as an excuse for inaction in response to an urgent and credible plea for help.
In the Christian life we’re not called to stay within earthly lanes; we’re called to bear much fruit to the glory of the Father (John 15:8). Sometimes that calling will drive God’s people out of earthly lanes, as it did in the eighteenth century when Whitefield and Wesley defied parish boundaries to proclaim the gospel wherever they could gain a hearing. Their historical example would be very familiar to Vaughan. Another thing that would be well known to Vaughan is the message of Titus 2:1–10 (especially verses 5, 8, and 10): that Christian conduct either attracts outsiders to the gospel or repels them — which makes antisemitism a “gospel issue”. So Vaughan had both the historical and theological resources to see how important it was to address the problem of a prominent evangelical pastor who had been accused by multiple Jewish community groups of antisemitism. Vaughan’s negligence in 2014 is indefensible, and his recent refusal to apologise for that negligence makes matters worse.
Vaughan’s inactivity regarding Stephen Sizer proves the truth of John Stuart Mill’s observation: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” The crushing burden of addressing Sizer’s misconduct, which has been shouldered almost entirely by the Jewish community and Jewish evangelicals, could have been considerably lightened if Vaughan had used his position to do something about Sizer when he had the opportunity. Vaughan exemplifies the cold unwillingness of senior evangelical leaders (with the honourable exceptions of Mike Ovey and Revd Angus MacLeay) to protect the Jewish community, the flock of Christ Church Virginia Water, and the reputation of Christ himself from Sizer’s destructive activity. The negligence of senior evangelical leaders such as Vaughan meant the work was left to others with far less power over evangelicalism.
Christianity Explored Ministries
Stephen Sizer served for many years as a trainer for Christianity Explored Ministries. In 2014, the board of CEM was shown the same evidence of Sizer’s antisemitic activity and dishonesty that had been shown to Vaughan Roberts. Once again, the dishonesty allegation was put in the foreground.
The board members were inescapably obliged to look at the evidence because of CEM’s working relationship with Sizer. The focus of the dishonesty allegation was Sizer’s May 2012 blogpost answering the Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ). In that post, as explained above, Sizer gave the impression that he’d never received a cautionary message from his bishop in November 2011 about his link to “The Ugly Truth”. For convenience, the key excerpt from Sizer’s public response to CCJ is reproduced again below:
Any ordinary reader would assume from Sizer’s aggrieved tone (“the alleged circumstances in which I was alleged”) that CCJ was wrong to say he’d been alerted to the antisemitic nature of the link in November. That was undoubtedly what Sizer wanted people to think, because he went on to attack CCJ: “If the CCJ does not feel able to make it clear that its allegations were ill founded it will, I hope, reflect on the reliability of its informants and think very hard before naming people who might in the future be the innocent victims of ill-considered complaints.” But all this was sheer bluster, because CCJ’s allegation — “Mr Sizer was alerted to the antisemitic nature of the website in November”— was true. As said above, in the section on Vaughan Roberts, Sizer had even sent a same-day reply to his bishop apologising for the Facebook link.
Sizer’s only conceivable wriggle room was his verbal switch from being alerted to the link in November to the link coming to his attention in January. If challenged by someone who knew the facts, Sizer could say he’d never properly absorbed his bishop’s November warning, which would allow him to say, “Yes I was alerted to the link in November, but it never came to my attention until January” — a kind of card trick with words. But this wriggle room doesn’t excuse Sizer’s deliberately misleading communication. Even if it were true that Sizer hadn’t absorbed the November warning (which for various reasons is inconceivable), the only honest way to defend himself against CCJ would have been to admit he hadn’t absorbed it, not to give the impression it never happened. Sizer’s attack on CCJ in the same post proves he wanted people to think CCJ was accusing him unjustly. Speech that misleads and deceives is dishonest speech.
Side Note
Observant readers will have noticed that Sizer’s post mentions an additional alleged alert about his Facebook link to “The Ugly Truth”, received in December 2011. This was a post published on 27 December 2011 about Sizer’s antisemitic conduct. The very first allegation in the post is about Sizer’s Facebook link to “The Ugly Truth”. Sizer responded to that post on his blog on the following day, 28 December 2011. Uncharacteristically, he later deleted that response. This current article hasn’t highlighted the December alert because it’s less relevant than the November alert to the question of Sizer’s delay in removing the link.
As Wade Mullen says in his well-respected report on the P.J. Smyth case, “one of the critical responsibilities of a Christian leader is to communicate truthfully and to understand the impact of communication that is either untrue or misleading.” Sizer failed in that critical responsibility. He led people to believe that CCJ’s allegation was false — even to the extent of attacking CCJ for making it — when in fact CCJ’s allegation was correct.
Ian Roberts’s Response to Sizer’s Dishonesty
The evidence demonstrating Sizer’s dishonesty was painstakingly laid out for Ian Roberts, the Chief Executive of CEM, prior to a CEM board meeting on 29 September 2014. Following that meeting, Roberts sent a reply to the complainant in which he defended Sizer, saying, “Stephen appears to have chosen his words very carefully.”
Ian Roberts’s defence of Sizer ought to horrify everyone reading this article. He should have grasped the seriously misleading nature of Sizer’s communication and the significance of what it revealed about Sizer. Or perhaps he did grasp it but chose for reasons of convenience to play along with Sizer’s verbal card trick. It would take a further eight years before a CofE tribunal, without any assistance from Sizer’s fellow evangelicals, said of Sizer:
on crucial issues relating to events, [the Tribunal] has found that on occasions … the Respondent’s account is implausible and untrue, and has rejected his evidence.
Earlier this year, CEM issued a statement addressing its handling of the Sizer case (see the image below). Given his position as CEM’s Chief Executive, Ian Roberts was presumably closely involved in the writing of this statement. It’s therefore significant that the statement fails to address CEM’s mishandling of the dishonesty allegation against Sizer, which was the primary allegation brought to CEM’s attention in 2014. Roberts has never apologised, either publicly or privately, for his response to the dishonesty allegation against Sizer. It must therefore be concluded that he remains unrepentant. In the opinion of this author, a leader with such faulty moral judgement shouldn’t hold the position of highest executive authority within CEM and shouldn’t sit on the Oak Hill College Council.
CEM’s April 2023 Statement in Evangelicals Now
CEM’s statement on the Sizer scandal, reproduced above, gives the impression that the 2014 complaints about Sizer caused CEM to suspend him. But in 2014 CEM firmly rejected those complaints. The decision to suspend Sizer in 2015 therefore represented a complete u-turn for CEM in its handling of the case. It’s disappointing that CEM’s statement doesn’t acknowledge this and doesn’t admit that it failed to notify the complainant when it performed its u-turn.
The concept of a secret suspension has nothing in common with New Testament discipline, which (when it reaches the level of suspension) should be done with the full knowledge of the church. In the case of a parachurch organisation, a suspension should be announced to the wider Christian community. If CEM had publicised its suspension of Sizer, it’s likely there would have been a much-needed domino effect within conservative evangelicalism, with other organisations also distancing themselves from Sizer and his church. As it was, the secret suspension provided no support whatsoever to the Jewish community. It was also very poorly enforced: later in 2015, while the suspension was still in effect, Sizer’s “About” page still said “He is a trainer for the Christianity Explored Course.”
CEM’s 2023 statement in EN went on to say, “When the board received no further complaints over the following year, Stephen’s suspension was lifted in April 2016 on a probationary basis.” It’s disturbing to see a major evangelical organisation admitting, apparently without any embarrassment, that it let Sizer back into the fold solely because of the absence of outside pressure. Such decisions should be based on the facts of the case itself, not on guesswork about public opinion.
After CEM reinstated Sizer in April 2016, he twice (in October 2016 and February 2017) broke the terms of a public pledge he’d made to his bishop to “refrain entirely from writing or speaking on any theme that relates, either directly or indirectly, to the current situation in the Middle East or to its historical backdrop.” In response, the bishop announced that he was banning Sizer from all preaching, teaching, leading of services, and social media activity, with the exception of a final farewell service. This public disciplining of a CEM trainer had no effect on CEM: according to CEM’s statement, CEM and Sizer remained in gospel partnership from April 2016 until October 2020. CEM’s statement doesn’t explain why it remained in partnership with a leader whose needless promise-breaking forced his bishop to ban him from ministering to his own flock.
A Welcome Apology
CEM’s board made many serious judicial mistakes in their dealings with Stephen Sizer, particularly Ian Roberts’s handling of the dishonesty allegation in 2014; the failure to publicise the 2015 and 2020 suspensions; the unprincipled decision to reinstate Sizer in 2016 based simply on the lack of outside pressure on CEM; and the failure to suspend him again after he was publicly disciplined by the Church of England in October 2016 and February 2017. However, CEM’s recent statement in Evangelicals Now includes an apology that is welcome:
“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.”
It’s true that this apology would have been much better if it had been more specific. Nonetheless, CEM’s apology is, to date, the only meaningful apology issued by an evangelical organisation for failing to take effective action against Stephen Sizer. (The inadequacy of the apologies issued by Evangelicals Now has been discussed elsewhere). It takes courage to be the first, especially against the backdrop of FIEC National Director John Stevens’s insistence that evangelical toleration of Sizer’s antisemitism wasn’t scandalous. For that, CEM, and in particular Kevin Appleton, the admirable current Chair of Trustees, should be commended.
It should also be noted that in December 2022, Jeremy Marshall acknowledged personal shortcomings in relation to the Sizer scandal. He had chaired CEM’s board at the height of its negligence regarding Sizer in 2014. In his gracious comment last December, he said “many (including me) while sympathetic in hindsight didn’t do as much as we could have done”.
It would be wrong to read too much into Jeremy Marshall’s words, especially since he is sadly no longer with us and cannot clarify his meaning. But at a minimum, his comment amounts to two important acknowledgments: first, that “many” were aware that something was wrong with Sizer—see his use of “sympathetic” in connection with James Mendelsohn’s campaign against Sizer’s antisemitism; and, second, that these “many” — presumably evangelicals, like Marshall himself — could have done more to support that campaign.
An Opportunity That Should Not Have Been Missed
Both Vaughan Roberts and the CEM board had an opportunity in 2014 to examine the case against Stephen Sizer. By 2014, Jewish evangelicals had already encountered persistent unwillingness from senior leaders to scrutinise Sizer’s alleged antisemitism. With that in mind, and anticipating more of the same, Vaughan and the CEM board were instead asked to consider evidence that Sizer was guilty of serious dishonesty. Vaughan refused to look at the evidence himself or suggest someone else who could; the CEM board looked at it and reached an indefensible and morally incompetent conclusion (it’s worth repeating that CEM’s recent apology, discussed above, does not acknowledge or repent of that particular offence).
Vaughan and CEM failed to take an easy-to-grasp opportunity to identify a wolf in sheep’s clothing eight years before action was finally taken — by non-evangelicals. Their negligence is symptomatic of British evangelicalism’s ongoing problems with justice.
