Bishop accused of letting cult run out of control

ANDREW BROWN

Religious Affairs Correspondent

The post-mortem on the Sheffield cult scandal took a bitter turn yesterday when a former priest at the church where the Nine O'Clock Service got its start blamed the Bishop of Sheffield, the Rt Rev David Lunn, and the Rev Stephen Lowe, the Archdeacon, for letting the cult get out of control.

In an article for the Church Times, Dr Mark Stibbe, who was curate at St Thomas's in Crookes, Sheffield, from 1990 to 1993, said: "It is clear now that the authorities failed to see that something alarmingly 'cult- like' was growing in their midst. Clearly these weaknesses require confrontation in the Sheffield diocese and in the Church of England ... there is a call to sincere confession...."

However, Canon Robert Warren, who was Dr Stibbe's vicar at St Thomas's, yesterday denounced his former curate's intervention. "It seems to me to be continuing the trial by media," he said. "The bishop and the archdeacon don't really have a right of reply."

Dr Stibbe's article does not claim that the group was under very tight control in its time at St Thomas's. "It would be fair to say that accountability was not the first characteristic of the NOS leadership. In spite of strenuous efforts by Canon Robert Warren, we never succeeded in bringing the NOS leaders into line with the wishes of the overall leadership of St Thomas's. Success had bred pride, and pride had bred unaccountable individualism ... The seeds of spiritual decay had already been sown at St Thomas's," says Dr Stibbe.

But he claims things grew much worse when the group discovered the "Creation Spirituality" of Matthew Fox, a former Dominican, now an Anglican priest famous for blending New Age ideas into Christianity.