The SPCK saga and Texan "Orthodoxy"
(Update now added at the end of this post)
Dave Walker has continued to post helpful updates to the mess that used to be the SPCK bookshop chain. The individual stories that many of us are hearing, some of which Dave mentions, continue to range from the bizarre to the appalling. There are so many of them revealing of bad management that even if some may (which I doubt) suffer from “Chinese Whispers” syndrome, I don’t think anyone can doubt that there is a major question mark over the Brewer brother’s business ethics and personnel management. They claim to be promoting Orthodoxy, but as their bizarre argument for Sunday trading based on the Canons of Laodicea shows, they seem to have a remarkably tenuous grasp of Orthodox theology, one that would seem to equal their grasp on Orthodox ethics.
Today’s Church Times carried the story further. In response the Brewers rushed out a letter which seems to be intended for customers. Ironically it still carries the www.spckonline.com web address in the header, despite the fact that they are supposed to be no longer using it.
The letter says (I quote it in full):
SCM-Canterbury prints a weekly ^newspaper” called Church Times. The Church Times’ offices are part of SCM-Canterbury Norwich offices.
A charity, SCM-Canterbury nevertheless seeks to compete with the Saint Stephen the Great bookshops through its own bookshops (including the shop 1 block from our own in London) and also through its coming, online store.
Sadly, it must be pointed out that the article in the November 2, 2007 edition is motivated by a similar “envy and jealousy” as what Saint Luke reported in Acts 13:45 (”But when the Jews saw the crowds, filled with envy and jealousy they contradicted what was said by Paul and talked abusively [reviling and slandering him].“) Clearly, SCM-Canterbury cannot be said to be motivated by a desire to support our work of Christian bookselling! It also has become painfully obvious that SCM-Canterbury’s continued harangues against our charity and our shops is really quite abusive and even slanderous.
As an example: SCM-Canterbury refused to run any story on the truly newsworthy event of the glorious consecration (by His Eminence Joseph Pop, Metropolitan Archbishop of Western Europe) on August 12, 2007 of the redundant church in Dorset - which our charity acquired. Yet now, nearly 3 months later, it ends an article about the bookshops with an unrelated and misleading post-script about that very church! Worse, the purported quotes are completely out of context: the priest mentioned below was simply an interim priest who served until the consecration.
Second, even though Church Times printed a parallel article to its employee’s (Kevin Allard) hurtful, untrue and slanderous email of 1 October 2007, it never printed his boss’ 25 October letter of apology for that same email;
Dear SPCK Shops
I believe that, though unintended, the email from Kevin Allard on 1st October 2007 conveyed a negative message. SCM-Canterbury regrets this and apologises to Saint Stephen the Great LLC and the SPCK Bookshops. SCM Canterbury Press agrees that this was an inappropriate type of response to queries received in Norwich from individual stores.
Yours
Michael Addison
Sales and Marketing Director
[SCM-Canterbury]
Thank you for your support of our shops. May the Holy Trinity sustain you and enable us to keep our eyes on the contest ahead, namely the mission of Christian bookselling.
J. Mark Brewer
Chairman, Saint Stephen the Great
It would seem to me that the allegations about the Church Times reporting, with the suggestion that it is simply a mouthpiece for its publisher, verge on libel. This would add the Church Times to a growing list of those who might have grounds for legal action. So far that includes (despite their incompetence over handling the deal) SPCK for the way their name has been tarnished, the suppliers whose bills have remained unpaid, and above all the many staff whose treatment would seem (even if only 25% of the stories are true) to contravene employment legislation over and over again.
Update: 22.00 (ish)
I’ve been trying to track down a bit more information about the relationship with the Orthodox Church. One of the accusations Mark Brewer’s letter makes is that the Church Times comment about the Orthodox priest of their Dorset Church is misleading. As of this writing, the first link on their Poole Orthodox Church page is St Dunstan, which leads to a “Page Not Found” error. But St Dunstan’s Orthodox congregation is meeting as the CT said, in an RC Church, and the wording makes it clear this is something new people need to note. St Dunstan’s is part of the Antiochian Orthodox Church (and their page also notes the change of venue). This change of venue for the congregation is dated there to one week before the Brewer’s Poole Church was consecrated as St Stephen’s by the Romanian Church’s Metropolitan for Southern and Western Europe (although it doesn’t seem worth a mention on his website).
Mr Brewer says the CT article is misleading because “the priest mentioned below was simply an interim priest who served until the consecration.” In fact, it looks as though the whole congregation has gone as well, and in the process, the Brewers’ church has shifted to an entirely different patriarchate, which doesn’t appear, as far as one can tell to have provided a priest for it. The only contact number is for “Hall Bookings”! It does rather look as if whoever’s doing the misleading here, it’s not the Church Times. Mr Brewer seems to have a slightly odd relationship with reality. It’s not just confined to SPCK and the bookshops.
General updates now available at this post of Cartoon Church.
November 2nd, 2007 at 5:05 pm
[...] Response to the Church Times report from the Brewers (printed on MetaCatholic): The SPCK saga and Texan "Orthodoxy" [...]
November 2nd, 2007 at 5:13 pm
[...] November PM) MetaCatholic has the text of a letter responding to today’s Church Times report: The SPCK saga and Texan "Orthodoxy". They are unhappy with SCM-Canterbury [...]
November 2nd, 2007 at 8:11 pm
[...] MetaCatholic has a copy of a letter sent from the owners of the spck chain to [...]
November 6th, 2007 at 3:14 am
It is bizarre that the Brewers seem to be so clueless about how Orthodoxy operates. On the Church in Poole, the CT has Fr Chrysostom saying: “We parted company with Mr Brewer and his organisation, as we found that the way in which they operated was contrary to our deanery statutes regarding the control of parishes.”
Presumably this is a reference to the Brewers bringing in a Metropolitan from an entirely different Patriarchate to consecrate the Church. The congregation in Poole predates the acquisition of the church, and seems to always have been under the juristiction of the Patricarch of Antioch. Now if there is one thing the Orthodox do not like, it is meddling with juristictional boundaries, as the recent schism in the Russian Orthodox community demonstrated.
I do wonder how clued up the Romanian Orthodox Church is on the Brewer’s organisation. They must have had some involvement with its foundation: the choice of patron (St Stephen is revered in Romania), the fact that Metropolitan Josif was one of the trustees and consecrates their churches. But most Romanians I’ve spoken to have never heard of the organisation, and it seems very strange that the Metropolitan would knowingly have trespassed over juristictional boundaries. I’d be very interested to see how this develops, especially since the Brewers have just purchased another church in Bradford.
November 7th, 2007 at 12:47 am
As web master of the Antiochian Deanery web site I want to confirm that our departure from the Poole church was necessitated by the impossibility of a priest serving a community apparently to be presided over by a bishop who was not of the diocese of the priest and community concerned; or at least that is what we took the act of consecration strongly to imply.
We have not had a relationship with Mr. Brewer or his organisation since we relocated, nor do we wish to have one. Nothing that has happened since has led us to regret our decision.
November 23rd, 2007 at 5:19 pm
[...] they do emerge it tends to be simply to burn bridges with other organisations, as listed in this intriguing post about the SSG’s argument with the Church Times. What do we make of all this? Well, it might simply be proof of what I have heard from another [...]
December 13th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Bizarre that there are two competing Orthodox churches in Poole with almost identical looking websites - St. Stephens and St. Dunstan. Even more bizarre that they link to competing photo archives that are so identical in content that at first you don’t spot the difference! This is clearly a very acrimonious split and someone appears to be not facing up to reality here! It makes the whole SCPK bookshop story begin to look like part of a pattern of behaviour - serial identity theft (badly managed)!
June 27th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
[...] Walker) the slowly unfurling disaster of the destruction of the former SPCK Bookshop chain. (See an earlier post of mine [...]
June 30th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
[...] June 27, 2008 · 11 Comments Steve Jeynes, former manager of SPCK/SSG Worcester, has been found dead, apparently having taken his own life. Doug Chaplin, a local parish priest, wrote as follows at 5.30pm today: Many people have been following (especially with the help of Dave Walker) the slowly unfurling disaster of the destruction of the former SPCK Bookshop chain. (See an earlier post of mine here) [...]
July 23rd, 2008 at 5:42 am
[...] you read this post at Metacatholic, and then read all the excerpted comments and trackbacks to the bottom, you’ll get a pretty [...]
July 24th, 2008 at 8:37 am
This is simply disgraceful. Have these people no notion of the canonical order of the Church–let alone of justice in the treatment of others? They seem bent in wreaking havoc wherever they set their sights. A disgrace!!!
July 24th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
[...] also more background to be found at MetaCatholic, including some interesting questions about Brewer’s rather [...]
July 26th, 2008 at 11:14 am
[...] claims that ongoing criticism in the Church Times has been motivated by the fact that the Times‘ [...]