At this week’s Make the UK Holy Again conference, Rev. Dr Bernard Randall shared with hundreds of Koreans from the UK and around the world the story of how his life was turned upside down for defending pupils’ freedom to believe the Biblical view of marriage. You can watch his speech and read the full transcript below.
Bernard lost his job and then his freedom to minister in the Church of England because he said pupils shouldn’t feel forced to believe in LGBT ideology.
We’re helping him win his employment case and free him up to minister once again.
For six long years this has continued at immense cost to Bernard.
He needs to know God’s people are on his side. Will you support him in the following ways?
Speech transcript
My story is in some ways very simple, in others extremely complex. The simple way of telling it is that I got into trouble for being a Christian, and as a result I have been banned from being a Christian by the Church to which I belong.
That simple telling is perhaps an exaggeration, but not by much. I was the Chaplain at a Church of England school. The senior leadership had invited a group called “Educate and Celebrate” to deliver training, and the aim of this group was to “embed gender, gender identity and sexual orientation in the life of the school”, with their purpose summed up in the need to “smash heteronormativity”.
Heteronormativity is the idea that society is built upon the male-female couple – an idea most obviously expressed in the Bible in the Ten Commandments: “Honour your father and mother, that it may go well with you and your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God is giving you.” And the name of the group tells you a lot about their purpose too – “Educate and Celebrate” – teach the whole LGBTQ+ agenda, and celebrate things like transgenderism.
As you can imagine, as a Christian there was a lot for me to be concerned about, and as a chaplain I felt it was my duty to make sure that the pupils at least heard the Christian understanding of these things. So when a pupil asked to address the question “How come we’re told we have to accept all this LGBT stuff in a Christian school?” I gave a sermon answering it. And the answer of course is, you don’t have to accept other people’s beliefs – you make up your own mind.
I said that whilst there’s no excuse for mistreating people, and you should respect those with whom you disagree, you may believe that marriage is properly only between a man and a woman, that ideally sexual intimacy belongs in such a marriage, that sex is real and can’t be changed, and that the language of gender identity is incoherent and only partly true at best. But most importantly, I said repeated, respect the people you disagree with.
And the respect shown to me by the school leadership? I was reported to the government’s Prevent anti-terrorism group; I was reported to safeguarding authorities at the local council, and the national Disclosure and Barring Service; I was sacked for gross misconduct – despite being the Christian chaplain of a Christian school saying that it is OK to accept Christian teaching during a Christian act of worship.
Now I was reinstated when I appealed the decision to sack me, but only with a list of twenty conditions, including censorship of all my sermons by the non-Christian Deputy Head who had played a large part in getting me disciplined, rules to stop me from saying anything controversial anywhere in the school, and an instruction to support all beliefs, both in chapel and elsewhere – except they meant all beliefs except Christian beliefs.
This didn’t last long. It all happened in 2019, and then in 2020 Covid came along, and the school used all the lockdowns as an excuse to get rid of me – no need for a chaplain they said, in the face of the biggest crisis to hit the Western world since 1945.
Since all that, much has happened. I took the school to court for religious discrimination, but lost the case. Only it turned out that one of the court’s members had posted anti-Christian material on social media, so I won my appeal, and the whole case will have to be heard again – which we’re expecting in October next year.
I want to thank Christian Concern for the massive support, both legal and pastoral, that they’ve given me through all this.
But the worst of it has been that alongside the trouble with the school as my former employer, my own Church has made my life infinitely harder. You see, the police officer from Prevent said that here was no risk of terrorism. And the two secular child safeguarding authorities both cleared me.
But the Church of England’s safeguarding team got hold of the whole thing, and they have not let go. I have been prevented from working as a minister in the Church because I am deemed a risk to children and adults who might hear me give a sermon. I am too dangerous to preach, because I might teach the Church’s own teaching. That’s an incredibly difficult thing to bear.
As an ordained minister my calling from God had been denied by the Church which ordained me. We each have our own path of discipleship and being a minister is mine. If I cannot walk that path, in obedience to the Lord, then I am not being the Christian God wants me to be. My own Church is not letting me follow the call of Jesus. I am too Christian for my Church it seems. It has been a very painful time indeed.
But how did any of this happen?
Well, the answer I think lies in the fact that my sermon touched on topics where Christian teaching is different than most of the Western world. There have always been differences between the ways of the world and the ways of God. That has been clear at least since Jesus taught us to give to Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and to God the things which are God’s.
Yet, in the West at least, things seem to be getting worse. We might note the pace of change – same-sex marriage came into English law just six years before my sermon, but had become something it wasn’t possible to question; gender identity has never become part of English law, though it too, very suddenly, with no public debate, became impossible to question. So we get a situation where the police officer from Prevent stated that what I had said wasn’t violent extremism, but was “inappropriate for society”. Views which just a few years before had been entirely common and mainstream were no longer acceptable in the eyes of the police.
And yet society is not yet completely lost: the local council safeguarding officer and the national Disclosure and Barring Service, the secular safeguarding authorities established by law, found no problem; the law does still protect freedom of speech and freedom of religion, even if it does so imperfectly; England is still better than most of the world for these things.
And our young people are not completely lost. When I returned to working in the school, all too briefly before Covid hit, two pupils came to my office and said it was good to have me back, and they said “Chapel will be interesting again” – these were not Christians, but they could see the value in being encouraged to think about the deeper things in life.
What they were showing is that people don’t lose the “God-shaped hole” in their lives because society has changed. When Augustine prayed “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you” he was right, and he’s still right.
There is still hope for the world, but if the world is lost it will not come back to the Father unless it hears of him. The prodigal son knew that he had a father to whom he could return, but how many people in today’s Western world really know this?
Most people don’t know their loving Father, so we rely on the Church to tell people about Him. And just as Jesus came to save sinners, and the lost sheep, with a call to holiness, so the Church carries on his mission – we are the royal priesthood, continuing his call to holiness.
But here we hit the most troubling part of my story, for although I am an ordained minister of the church of England, teaching the acceptability of the Church’s own position – note I said it was acceptable, I didn’t even say it should or must be held, though that ought to have been possible – it was not the worldly authorities who acted most harshly against me.
The school where I worked sacked me from that one job as a minister; but it was the Church of England which decided I should never be allowed to work in any job as a minister.
It was the Church whose officials decided that teaching Christian beliefs is harmful; it was a Church official who wrote “due to some church scripture supporting Rev. Randall’s views the church itself may also be a risk factor, to be used to justify Rev’d Randall’s opinions.”
Let me say that again: “due to some church scripture supporting Rev’d Randall’s views the church itself may also be a risk factor, to be used to justify Rev. Randall’s opinions.” A Church official said that the Church is dangerous because of what the scriptures say.
But perhaps there is nothing new under the Sun, for the Bible warns against this kind of thing. Isaiah 5v20, for example: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”
When Jesus warned of the sin which cannot be forgiven, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, this surely is the kind of thing he meant.
So how is it that parts of the Church in England are guilty of the unforgivable sin? And I say “in England” deliberately. Although there are many faithful disciples of Christ up and down the country, it is still the Church of England which sets the agenda for how the nation views all churches and all Christians.
If we want England to become again a holy nation, we cannot bypass the Church of England. How the Church of England behaves still affects all Christians. This victim of the assaults of the devil cannot be left by the roadside.
But the problem for the Church of England, as for most of those who call themselves Christians, is that they live in and are influenced by a society where, for almost all the people of his nation, they would rather be moral than holy – or at least moral as they see it. There is a sort of gravity in any complex organisation, which pulls it towards the values of wider society if it does not carefully guard its own distinct values.
That is the heart of the problem, or so it seems to me. The idea that we should protect people from harm when we can is a good idea. It is right to be moral.
But the idea that hearing Christian teaching is harmful to those who are same-sex attracted, because it suggests a limit to their ability to have sex with anyone they want whenever they want; or the idea that it is kind to agree with men who say they are women and behave as if they are truly women, because to tell the truth would hurt their feelings; these ideas which the Church’s safeguarding officers are pushing me to accept as the price of being allowed to preach and minister, these ideas are based on two lies.
The first is that we can be whatever we want to be – that we can make ourselves.
This is very obvious in the transgender ideology which I challenged, because that belief system suggests that simply by saying “I am a woman” a man can change what he is. But as Christians we know that only God can self-define by saying “I am” – remember the words of God to Moses from the burning bush. We do not create ourselves with our words (or in any other way) because instead there is one God who creates us, and we must accept what he makes us to be. In my sermon I challenged the lie of self-creation.
The other lie is that we can know what it is to be moral from within ourselves with no outside help.
This is the ancient lie of the serpent – eat the fruit and you shall be like gods, knowing good and evil. And this idea that we as humans we can know what is moral is why the teaching of the Bible is rejected by so many – people say the modern world has a better morality on marriage, on sexuality, on diversity and tolerance and kindness and so many other things. When in my sermon I suggested that Biblical morality on these things is good, I had to be punished. I had challenged the lies, and that could not be allowed.
Instead of seeking holiness in the teachings of scripture, the world around us holds onto the morality given by the father of lies, a so-called morality which indulges the desires of the flesh instead of seeking the things of the Spirit. But those of the world are “lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God”.
The teaching of the Bible looks to the powers of the world as if it harms people because it says you do not, you cannot, create yourself – you are what God made you to be. But what a delight that we are made by a loving Father through his Word, who took flesh so that we might have eternal life.
The teaching of the Bible looks to the world as if it harms people because it places limits on their desires, and refuses to accept the morality of the flesh. But what a delight that we are given the examples and teachings of Jesus, who shows us how to live a life which is holy as the Father is holy. For make no mistake, the true morality is the path the Father has given us through his Word. It is quite different than what the world of flesh expects – those who follow the Biblical way are set apart from the world – they are following the way of holiness.
Now, when I challenged the lies by setting out the truthful, Biblical, holy way, it was no surprise to me that some of those in the school objected, because the objectors were not Christians. What caught me out was just how much power they had in what was supposed to be a Christian school, and just how strongly they rejected freedom of religion and freedom of speech, even though they were supposed to be teaching the importance of such freedoms. That was bad enough.
The real shock in all this is the way my Church has treated me. The very people who should have been standing by me, supporting me, are the ones who have done the most damage. All because our Enemy has attacked the Church with his lies, like a robber waiting to take away our treasure.
But the Bible warns us of this too. Some are like the seed which fell on rocky soil, who wither away when persecution comes; they are those mentioned in 1 Timothy, when “the Spirit expressly states that in later times some will abandon the faith to follow deceitful spirits and the teachings of demons,” Jude warns of those who “turn the grace of our God into a license for immorality, and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.” We have always known that churches are in danger of being corrupted, otherwise why would Jesus and Paul and others warn us against wolves in sheep’s clothing?
But the speed of change in Western society has made this an even more dangerous time. It is harder for the good teaching to drive out the bad in a world where people’s ears are itching at the myths pushed by social media. My story shows us the particular challenge we face. Of the two lies I identified, the one about us thinking that we can know the difference between good and evil for ourselves is as old as the Garden of Eden.
But the lie about our ability to create ourselves has only appeared relatively recently in history, and it has become so much a part of the Western mind that it is incredibly hard to fight against it. Yet it can damage the Church just as much as the robbers on the road to Jericho.
So I finish with a plea to you. Do not abandon the Church of England by the roadside as you travel down the way of revival. Yes, the injuries may be so great, the cancer so deep, that some surgery is required.
But let your prayers be the oil and wine and bandages which dress the wounds. Let your fervour for the Gospel be the donkey upon which you place this poor injured person. Perhaps I push the metaphor too far, but let the two denarii handed to the inn-keeper be the truths you tell which break the two lies.
Restoring this beaten and battered Church to health, to holiness, is no small task. For mankind this would be impossible, but with God, all things are possible, even this.
To find out more about Bernard’s case and how you can be praying for him, visit his case page.
