Welcome to Mortification of Spin, the casual conversation about things that count with Carl Truman, Todd Pruitt, and Amy Bird.

Mortification of Spin is a weekly podcast from the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

Let's join this week's conversation.

Thank you. Welcome to Mordification of Spin.

I'm the host, Carl Truman, along with my two other hosts, Todd Pruitt, pastor of a PCA church in Harrison Bird, Virginia, and Amy Bird,

author and housewife theologian. Today, we want to talk about a topic that unfortunately

seems to come up with remarkable regularity in the church world in which we now live,

and is unlikely to go away anytime soon.

That is the question of abuse within the church.

Many of you will probably be aware of the controversy that currently swirls around a man known as Jonathan Fletcher, who is a high-ranking

member of the English evangelical aristocracy connected to the U.N. Camps, the U.N. camp movement.

If you don't know what the U.N. camps are, there are these camps for boys from the elitist of private schools in

England and produced such notables in the past as, for example, John Stott. And also Jonathan

headed up the Proclamation Trust, which is a group and organization that's done a tremendous amount of good in England

in promoting expository preaching and placing the proclamation of the word at the heart

of church life. Anybody watching the British evangelical scene will know the number of years ago

the case of John Smith exploded onto the newsstands.

John Smith was, again, like Jonathan Fletcher, a high-ranking member of the U-N constituency

and was wanted for physically abusing young men at the camps.

And those of us who were following this story were really waiting for the next shoe to drop,

knowing that it would have been impossible in that kind of network for a man like that

to have done what he was doing without others being in the know and others being involved. And recently,

...