As I researched the Anglican Church’s ongoing sex abuse crisis, a secondary story about organizational power emerged. It illustrates the gulf between an organization’s leaders and its followers—and how those leaders must be much more careful than they think about how their behavior comes off to followers. This story pairs with two from the online gaming world that run along similar lines. We’ll check these three stories out, examine their similarities, and maybe figure out these leaders could have prevented their problems.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 2/18/2025. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now! From introduction: Kanye West’s early career; his current spiral.)
SITUATION REPORT: Anglican Archbishop forgets how organizational power works
Last week, we talked about a big meeting held in the UK by the leaders of the Anglican Church (also called the Church of England). Among many other topics, they tried to hammer out responses to their ongoing sex abuse crisis and cover-up scandal. That scandal had grown to include the most powerful leader within their organization, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. Amid a storm of controversy, he resigned.
An interim leader quickly came forward to continue shepherding the denomination till they could find a replacement: the second most powerful leader there, Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell. Many thought Cottrell also had his eye on the actual replacement position as well.
Alas, Cottrell himself turned out to be part of the cover-up scandal. Despite vocal opposition, he’s still hanging on to his interim position by his fingernails. He refuses to quit now, not when the prize is so close.
Last month, some of those leaders accused Cottrell of another abuse of power. This time around, he and the Bishop of Oxford Steven Croft allegedly bullied a hiring committee into hiring John Perumbalath as the Bishop of Liverpool back in 2022. The hiring committee had grave concerns about Perumbalath, but allege that Cottrell and Croft “coerced” them into hiring him.
Later, two women—one another bishop!—later accused Perumbalath of sexually harassing them. One source alleges that Cottrell found out about these accusations between the hiring decision and Perumbalath’s ascension to his new role, but did nothing. In fact, Cottrell took a pastoral role toward Perumbalath toward the end, counseling him and guiding him. But his efforts were for naught: In response to the growing controversy there, Perumbalath resigned/retired just this past January.
Cottrell’s response to these bullying accusations is enlightening. He either really has no idea how organizational power works, or he knows what he did is wrong and is trying to find a magic apology that’ll appease the people who disapprove of how he used that power.
Unfortunately for Cottrell, once the group notices abuses of power, it won’t forget them easily.
1) The guild that owns the game admins owns the admins’ power
Many years ago, I heard about a huge scandal on a relatively small online roleplaying game in the late 1990s-early 2000s. This scandal had its playerbase divided and angry. It had grown out of suspicions that one player-run guild in the game was receiving preferential treatment from the game’s admins. Rumors abounded about how often admin-run plots centered around this one large guild, how much ingame money the guild always seemed to have, how admins spawned goodies for them all the time, how quickly their building and roleplay requests got fulfilled compared to those of other players, and more—oh, and so many more.
These rumors contained many elements of truth. For one thing, the game’s lead admin (“Joe”) and his significant other (“Jane”) both played leadership characters in that guild. Yes, objectively speaking an awful lot of plots centered around this guild. And yes, they had a magnificent house ingame and enough money that money had no meaning for the guild anymore, whereas player-run guilds had to scrabble to maintain themselves, much less to gain and improve land ingame for their guildhouse.
What I’m describing here went completely against that game’s own rules. Admins could play ingame, sure, but they always had to be careful to keep the attention on players. They also had to abandon the characters if their real identities got discovered.
Joe and Jane didn’t care. They loved being the leaders of their pet guild. They refused to leave it.
The firestorm of criticism their behavior kicked up just kept increasing and intensifying. People began to leave the game. Others complained on the game’s forums. Still, Joe and Jane refused to quit their characters or to hand it entirely over to players and quit interfering with it.
These two admins really could not see themselves through players’ eyes. They couldn’t see the rising tide of resentment in the playerbase. That, or their antiprocess prevented them from reaching that understanding.
(Related: How antiprocess helps people avoid uncomfortable truths.)
Looking back, it’s clear to me that their behavior contributed mightily to the eventual and disgraceful downfall of what had once been one of the best, highest-quality games of its nature. Some games can survive this sort of scandal. Others can’t.
And the same scandal happens even now in gaming as well as in the Anglican Church.
2) Organizational power means higher standards, or at least it should
On an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online roleplaying game—like World of Warcraft) a few days ago, a player noticed that one of the game’s official streamers was behaving in an extremely unprofessional way. This streamer’s use of slurs and extremely insulting language violates all kinds of rules within the game itself, but also in its official livestreamers’ group and the streaming service.
When the player brought this behavior up to the game’s community managers, however, none of them seemed to take the report seriously at all. If I hadn’t noticed the stream of admin edits on the posts themselves, I’d wonder if they had even seen it!
No, they were only concerned with tidying up inflammatory arguing in the thread. After a couple of days, they closed it. As far as I know, nothing has been done about the streamer. From what others have written in the thread, this lack of action appears to be an ongoing and growing concern with how the game’s community managers and leaders are handling such behavior.
3) A staffer gets “overly chummy” in another game and learns why that’s a terrible idea
Over the last couple of weeks, a new game called Pantheon (development studio: Visionary Realms) ran into a similar situation. Someone accused the studio’s technical director of spawning monsters for his favorite guild to kill and loot.
This situation emerged during the game’s playtesting phase. It’s not open yet, but some players have been allowed to play the game to help the developers find and squish bugs in the code. The studio intends to wipe the playerbase before formally opening.
One group of players doing a lot of playtesting have formed a guild. That guild took playtesting very seriously. It also brought coders and developers into close contact with guild members. That kind of contact is always a terrible idea. It’s just begging for a public-relations nightmare. And that’s exactly what happened.
The studio’s managers investigated the accusation. They say they’ve found no evidence that the developer did any such thing. However, he did joke about doing it. He did this during one of his many hangout chat sessions in Discord with the guild’s players. One player was present for this joking-around but later left the guild in anger. That player appears to have taken the joke “out of context.”
The studio took this heads-up very seriously. Its CEO, Chris Rowan, has instituted all kinds of rules and logging and checks on developers’ power. He wants to prevent even the appearance of evil, to borrow the classic Christianese phrase from 1 Thessalonians 5:22.
How organizational power changes everything
Out of all of our examples today, this Visionary Realms CEO might be the only one who understands the nature of organizational power. He recognizes that a vast gulf exists between those with power and those with less or none. On the studio’s Discord, he said this:
[M]ore importantly, any arrangements that involve community such as pre-patch testing cannot and will not be structured or run in a way that allows any advantages, whether real, or even just perceived. Until now, we have worked closely with a guild for pre-patch testing because they were self-organizing, insanely competent, and saved us the huge administrative effort required to marshal testing forces when needed. But guilds compete. With that comes a great deal of passion and potential volatility, especially when there is any perceived risk of one guild receiving unfair advantages.
We thought we could contain the risks, but that turned out to be overly optimistic and just plain wrong. I should not have allowed it and take full responsibly for the poor judgment in not stopping it. [As reported by Massively Overpowered]
He’s right.
Even when those with power strictly follow their group’s rules and act with the purest and kindest of intentions, less-powerful people may misinterpret and misconstrue what’s happening. When those with power act in their own self-interest or break rules, those below them in power will notice almost immediately. Either way, word spreads very quickly within the followers’ ranks.
Within an organization, leaders must remember that even their most innocent behavior can be vastly misconstrued by the group’s followers. Leaders at all ranks are under a higher level of scrutiny than regular followers ever are. Thus, leaders have got to be much more aware of the lines of personal power. They must always be aware of how their behavior will look to others. For the group to continue to run in functional ways, the group must have common-sense rules for leaders that maintain transparency and accountability at all times.
Organizational power in Anglicanism serves the powerful at the expense of the powerless
In the case of Stephen Cottrell and the 2022 hiring committee, it’s just impossible for me to imagine he didn’t realize he was bullying the members to hire his favorite candidate. Here’s how the whistleblower at that meeting describes Cottrell’s behavior:
A whistleblower has now claimed that at least one woman on the committee which hired Bishop Perumbalath was “bullied” into changing her vote in a display that left one member “deeply disturbed”. [. . .]
The whistleblower said they were “shocked” when the Archbishop and the Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Rev Steven Croft, urged members of the 14-strong committee to approve Dr Perumbalath after he failed to answer a question on safeguarding appropriately. [. . .]
The Crown Nominations Commission (CNC) twice voted 9-5 against Dr Perumbalath’s appointment, falling one vote short of the required two-thirds majority.
The whistleblower alleged the Archbishop and Bishop Croft then used “bullying tactics” to try to pressure people to overturn the ballot, and that a female member later disclosed she had “laid aside her concerns over safeguarding” and changed her vote.
A third and final ballot secured a 10-4 result in his favour.
Even if by some spectacular luck Cottrell thought he was simply reasoning with the committee members, it’s a bad look. He’d been guiding Perumbalath up through Anglican ranks for years by then. Julie Roys describes Perumbalath as Cottrell’s “protégé,” and I agree. I found social media posts going back to 2010 that support that these two have had at least a crony-network friendship for years.
Alas, none of those posts can be pulled up. Mysteriously, the search engine dates are all that remain. And also mysteriously, there’s far less evidence showing any similar closeness with Bishop Steven Croft. Remember, Cottrell took Croft along to that fateful 2022 committee meeting. It seems like Cottrell only wanted Croft there to add some oomph to his power play.
If so, it was another poorly-considered decision. Already in 2020, Croft had faced his own big controversy around covering up spiritual abuse and shielding abusive ministers within his diocese.
Seriously: The more I dig, the worse these guys all look.
Organizational power in dysfunctional groups
In Christian mythology, Christian leaders used to care a lot more about what they called their witness—that is to say, their overall level of credibility. I don’t think they ever did to any meaningful degree, no, but I do agree that their witness gets worse by the year.
Knowing what I know about these three Anglican leaders (Perumbalath, Croft, and Cottrell), there’s no charitable read I can give their behavior and the 2022 meeting’s outcome. All three of them are hypocrites who either abused others or helped abusers in significant ways. One, luckily, has already resigned/retired. The other two still wield power and clearly will not give it up without a fight.
The Anglican Church is no stranger to abuse cover-up scandals, any more than it’s a stranger to abuse itself. This kind of pattern waves all kinds of red flags. It warns us that this organization itself is compromised. Its leadership structure allows for cover-ups and cronyism. The entire organization is rotted from the inside out. It cannot be saved or reformed—at least without ditching all of its current leaders, hiring new ones from scratch, and forming new policies and rules that everyone’s observing diligently and from the get-go.
This is why no dysfunctional group can be fixed. Those in power don’t want to lose any of their power. The dysfunction as it is has benefited them to enormous degrees. So they’re not going to agitate for real change. But those at lower levels lack the power to force those upper-end leaders to play along with any reforms.
To build upon something Pusha T tells us in the 2010 Kanye West song “Runaway,” once someone realizes that one of their group’s high-ranking leaders has committed wrongdoing and won’t face consequences for it, that group member has only two real choices:
Now pick your next move
You could leave or live with it
And so it all comes to this: These two remaining Anglican leaders are either so poorly-trained in leadership that they make bad judgment calls constantly—or else they’re knowingly acting to cover their own and each others’ asses. Either way, none of them should have any place in any organization’s leadership. They reflect poorly on the group as a whole. They rightly should make everyone wonder what other wrongdoing Anglican leaders are hiding.
I bet there are a lot more terrible secrets lurking under those smiles.
NEXT UP: How rituals make use of the railroad tracks of our most ancient human hardwiring. See you soon! <3
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[Anglicans], I’ve got a plan
Run away as fast as you can
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