This is about the extraordinary case of Rev Dr Bernard Randall and the latest developments in his story. In 2019, Dr Randall, an ordained Church of England (CofE) minister, was working without any issues at Trent College in Derbyshire. The college had a CofE chapel and a CofE ethos and Dr Randall was employed to pastor, teach and uphold Christian beliefs in the school. Everything changed, however, when the college invited extreme LGBT group Educate and Celebrate to implement its ‘gold standard’ inclusive curriculum to even nursery aged children.
At a staff training day, Educate and Celebrate’s Elly Barnes introduced the work of the partly Government-funded charity to school staff. She encouraged staff to stand up and chant “smash heteronormativity” – the belief that male and female relationships are the norm. During this training, which Dr Randall attended, Ms Barnes misled staff that ‘gender identity’ was protected under the Equality Act and lied that her organisation was recognised by Ofsted, which it wasn’t. Before going defunct, Educate and Celebrate was given access to thousands of schools across the country teaching ‘Queer Theory’, the ‘gender unicorn’ and telling educators to remove the terms ‘boys and girls’ from the school environment.
In recent years, Educate and Celebrate, especially its patrons, have been plagued by scandal to the point it was quietly closed by the Charity Commission. One patron, Stephen Ireland, has been charged with multiple accounts of sex abuse against children, including rape and conspiracy to kidnap.
Another patron, transgender comic, Jordan Grey, stripped naked on Channel Four and played the piano with his genitalia. Gray had suggested that he went into schools to “talk about gender” on behalf of Educate and Celebrate, adding that “toddlers kind of get it straight away.”
Another patron, Peter Tatchell, published a letter in 1997 claiming that children aged nine to 13 can gain “great joy” in having sex with adults. He said: “it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful”. Mr Tatchell may now have distanced himself from these views but still campaigns to lower the age of consent.
Dr Randall raised concerns with senior management at Trent College about Educate and Celebrate, but his concerns were swept aside. Implementing the extreme programme into the moral fabric of the school, pupils asked Dr Randall: “Why do we have to learn about this LGBT stuff?” In response, Dr Randall gave a sermon in the school’s CofE chapel, which reflected CofE teaching on marriage and human identity. He said it was okay for pupils to question and debate LGBT ideology. The consequences for Dr Randall, however, were devastating.
In a Kafkaesque development, without his knowledge, Dr Randall was reported by Trent College to the Government’s terrorist watchdog, Prevent, for “religious extremism”. He was also reported to the Local Authority Designated Officer (LADO) as a potential “safeguarding risk”. Both said he had no case to answer. Nonetheless, Trent College, reported Dr Randall to the CofE’s safeguarding team at the Derby Diocese. One member of staff is recorded as describing the report as “a game changer”. Dr Randall was then investigated, censored and then isolated and ‘made redundant’ during the pandemic.
If losing his job was not enough, Dr Randall then experienced what he describes as “Stalinesque interrogations” by the CofE’s local safeguarding team who concluded that not only was the expression of his beliefs a safeguarding risk, but that Biblical teaching on marriage and “the Church itself is a risk-factor”. Dr Randall was told that he had to undergo an independent safeguarding assessment by a psychologist. The psychologist chosen specialised in assessing sex-offenders. Refusing to do so, as it would be an admittance that he had done something wrong, the Bishop of Derby, the Rt Rev Libby Lane refused to allow him to officiate in church services.
Blacklisted from his vocation, Dr Randall pursued a serious complaint of misconduct over this decision, but this was blocked by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. However, a senior church legal officer for clergy discipline subsequently found that the Archbishop had “misunderstood the scope of his powers”, and was “plainly wrong”. The same investigating officer described the blacklisting of Dr Randall as “egregious” and a “gross” error and said that there was no evidence to conclude that he was a safeguarding risk. Despite repeatedly trying to block the case proceeding, Justin Welby was forced to order a review of the safeguarding processes within the Derby diocese. Over a year since this decision, the CofE has still not resolved the issue or given Dr Randall’s ‘Permission to Officiate’ certificate back.
After launching legal action over his dismissal by Trent College, Bernard’s case was heard at Nottingham Justice Centre, before Judge Victoria Butler and lay member and trade unionist, Jed Purkis. Before and after a ruling was made on the case, which found against Dr Randall on every point, Mr Purkis made a series of anti-Christian and anti-conservative posts on social media. Mr Purkis stated: “Only atheists should be allowed to run for office,” accompanied by, “Damn right, you won’t catch us killing in the name of our non-god.” He also said of Christians: “If they’re that f***ing super how come there’s so much shit going on in the world?” and “I need no ‘higher power’ to tell me the right way to treat people and behave.”
In March 2024, at the same Nottingham tribunal, Judge Butler and Mr Purkis also began presiding on another similar Christian Legal Centre case, involving Christian teacher ‘Hannah’. Hannah was taking legal action after being sacked for raising safeguarding concerns about an eight year-old ‘transitioning’ under the guidance of Stonewall in a primary school. During this hearing, Mr Purkis’s anti-Christian posts were discovered, and a recusal application was made by Hannah’s lawyers for “apparent bias”. In a rare move, Judge Victoria Butler was forced to recuse the whole panel, including herself, and the hearing collapsed. The Judicial Conduct Investigations Office, supported by the Senior President of Tribunals and the Lord Chancellor, subsequently said that Mr Jed Purkis’s comments amounted to misconduct and he was given a formal rebuke.
The Purkis and Butler controversy brought into question whether anti-Christian bias had influenced their ruling on Bernard’s case. In her ruling, Judge Butler had also suggested that Bernard had “taken an extreme view of Educate and Celebrate” and she repeatedly and falsely stated that the group was recognised by Ofsted. As a result, this week at the Employment Appeals Tribunal, the original ruling made by Butler and Purkis was overturned as “unsafe” and an urgent retrial has been ordered.
While this is encouraging news, huge questions remain. When will the Church of England give Bernard his permission to officiate back? Based on the evidence, who is the safeguarding risk to children here? Dr Randall, Educate and Celebrate, or the Church of England? When will Dr Randall receive justice almost six years since he gave his last sermon?
Andrea Williams is the founder and Chief Executive of the Christian Legal Centre. This post was originally published on X. If you would like to support Bernard you can make a donation to the Christian Legal Centre as it continues to pursue justice for him.
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Dr Randall, clearly your faith is more important for you than your career.
You acted with integrity and I thank you for resisting evil.
I have a feeling the CofE may not be the right place for you. But that’s a decision for you to make.
Unreal. Persecution of a man for no reason other than he is a Christian and won’t follow the Queer-Trans Fascist program.
And I am told by the ‘humanists’ et al that this is the Age of ‘The Science’, the Age of ‘Reason’. Further that religious belief (just Christian) is for the stupid and unlettered. Yet they/you/the useless Church of England/society at large, stand by while a mental illness cult fascistically demands obedience and burns dissenters.
those who believe in nothing will fall for anything
Then, once fallen, they’re believers. Faith is a tricky thing. It seems that most humans have a strong urge to believe but little urge to question before believing. We are emotional creatures first and reflective thinkers only afterwards.
It’s.much worse than all that.
We are living in tines of extreme psychotic madness.
What are the chances of a preacher in a Muslim temple being hounded as a religious extremist for speaking out against homosexuality or transexuality?
Do the people that hound this man think the Muslim population embrace homosexuals and trans people? We all know the answer to that.
So we have a completely insane country in which a Christian questioning (merely questioning) the gay trans agenda is hounded down and at the same time a population known to be rather intolerant of gay and trans people is given special preferential treatment, in our courts no less.
The whole thing is demonic.
For “Educate and Celebrate,” read Indoctrinate and Denigrate. No surprise that further up the CofE food chain disgraced Archbishop Wishy-Washy Welby is implicated in this English Inquisition.
When degenerates like Barnes, Tatchell and Grey are sponsored by the state to pervert the unassailable fact that partnerships between men and women are the bedrock of society upon which all else rests, then the Age of Unreason is truly upon us.
Why on earth Tatchell gets any air time on GBN i will never know. I’m afraid such degeneracy cannot be compartmentalised and ignored while everyone goes off and obliviously agrees on immigration, heat pumps and Net Zero etc. I for one cannot ignore or overlook things like that.
1. Bet Purkis would not have written or said those things if it had been said by an Iman.
2. Doesn’t it strike everyone as odd that a Christian church and its heads are actively denouncing and tearing up the bible? It’s almost as if the Anti Christ and his demons were running the show.
3. Note the head of the Cof E and the prime minister actively supported Ramadan this week, whilst staying silent on Lent.
4. The individuals involved in this witch hunt should be sacked, and subject to civil actions, and actively publicised as being anti child in the Press.
I hope the true Christian believer. the Reverand finds a safe home, where he can practice his religion in a community that actually believes in Christanity.
Clearly the COf E stands for church of Evil
According to Catholic Cardinal Vigano, we are now living in the Kingdom of the Antichrist:
https://gorthodox.com/en/news-item/russia-the-last-bastion-of-civilization-against-barbarism-catholic-archbishop-vigano-fierce-critic-of-pope-francis
“An infernal project…in which hatred for Christian civilization wants to create a society of slaves subservient to the Davos elite…We cannot be surprised that, after de-Christianizing the Western world, this elite considers Russia an enemy to be overthrown. The Russian Federation undeniably stands as the last bastion of civilization against barbarism, and gathers around it all those nations that do not intend to submit to the colonization of NATO, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and that heap of foundations that have as their purpose the indoctrination of the masses, the manipulation of information……”
https://abyssum.org/2023/03/17/archbishop-viganos-letter-to-the-first-session-of-the-international-movement-of-russophiles-meeting-in-moscow-on-march-14-2023/
“Those who today declare that Russia is an enemy consider Europeans, Americans, Australians and Canadians as enemies and treat them as such, persecuting and impoverishing them. But while World Economic Forum emissaries in Western governments can legislate against the good of their own citizens and hold world leaders in the palm of their hands…..the coup d’état perpetrated against humanity by dangerous subversives whose declared purpose is the establishment of an infernal tyranny, in which hatred of God as well as hatred of man created in His image, illness, death, ignorance, poverty, violence, selfishness, and corruption reign supreme. It is the kingdom of the Antichrist. “
Another patron, transgender comic, Jordan Grey, stripped naked on Channel Four and played the piano with his genitalia. Gray had suggested that he went into schools to “talk about gender” on behalf of Educate and Celebrate, adding that “toddlers kind of get it straight away.”
By virtue of being seriously far removed from understanding sex due to lack of biological development, let alone the myriad of complications of human society in general, toddlers easily fall for evil perverts like Grey and, being sexually mature himself, he’s perfectly aware of this. This is a definition of child abuse — tricking a child into doing or believing something by exploiting the fact that it’s still much too young to understand it.
Considering the not exactly stellar history of the CoE wrt sexual abuse of boys by – well – evil perverts, could letting someone like this loose among elementary school children perhaps be a case of “old habits dying slowly”, especially if the Greased Weaselby was again involved in denying, blocking and covering up?
“Damn right, you won’t catch us killing in the name of our non-god.”
Mr Purkis thinks atheists don’t murder millions of people.
You might like to clarify that. Saying that a pronouncement from the ludicrous Tatchell is similar to a cure for cancer is rather hard to understand.
To paraphrase Napoleon who muttered “Wellington, why is it always Wellington?”
WELBY, why is it always WELBY?
This man is a disgrace, utterly devoid of spiritual integrity, and openly an advocate for all the corrupting agenda of Davos, Schwab & Soros. I have a photo of him being jabbed at the beginning of the mRNA injections programme quoting ” Jesus said we must love one another, and taking the vaccine is part of that commandment”
Did Jesus also say “never mind if it’s Russian Roulette boys & girls, and whole families (like one I know locally) will die within a week of the jab if their number is on the batch”?
Hanging this decent man out to dry is nothing less than what I expect from this despicable “Archbishop”.
I believe the technical term for what’s happened here is “creepy”. Is Britain truly as hopelessly mired in this insanity as it appears?
Yes
Hmm, if the King were really a Defender of the Faith, Dr Randall might be able to petition him, but alas……
Poor man, having to go through this for 6 years. Hope he is ok!
who pays for all these biased tribunals and ‘safe guarding people’? Are they ever held accountable for their biased bigoted decisions?
When we were young, we used to pass mental asylums and point at them. Then they closed them and the inmates are now running the country. Lord help us!!!
It’s not my fault that Tatchell had his dinner money taken off him in the playground.
Makes sense for the C of E to put Canterbury, York and Liverpool within the decision making on Safeguarding NOT. The bible (The word of God) makes it clear that homosexuality is an abomination.
Thought this was a free speech platform, I guess the subject of paedophilia is the ultimate litmus test. If you are that sure of your arguments, let’s hear them.
It’s never ok to abuse a child for one’s own sexual gratification, because that’s a human being and not a sex toy.
Of course, goes without saying.
Responsible adults generally take the view that minors have insufficient experience of sexual ethics to be able to offer an informed opinion on the topic. Pre-verbal infants are self evidently incapable of speech, be it free or constrained. Adults who claim that children, babies and infants enjoy sexual activity while being filmed and photographed are not only taking the liberty of speaking for them, but also projecting their own sexual predelictions on to their victims. There are no arguments in favour of child sexualisation or sexual abuse. Please rehearse your peverted opinions elsewhere.
MODERATOR HERE. Free speech or not, in our brief internal discussion this morning about the Comments under this article we agreed that discussion of paedophilia was off the topic for this article, and that we were unwilling to allow TDS to be used as a platform for its defence. Hence the chain of Comments, about which we had received a complaint, was deleted
I have been reading HereticTOC (Tom O’Carroll’s blog, the ex Chair of the PIE in the 1970s) And reading blogs like that, and Sp!ked shaped the Libertarian in me. I have read both his books….Paedophilia The Radical Case & Michael Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons, so I know about the subject matter and it’s been fun batting away the ignorance on the subject that cost me many Twitter accounts. Exposing the ignorance is like shooting fish in a barrel but the DS team don’t seem to want to extend free speech to this subject. I don’t hate people who disagree on this subject, because if I did, I would hate 99.9% of people.
As far as I can recall, Justin Welby misunderstood the scope of his powers and was plainly wrong about most things. And I hope that when he makes it to the pearly gates, the admissions officers take him to task for all the woke harm he has done. Well done Dr Randall for not giving in.
Is Christianity now illegal in our enlightened country ?