Official finding Christian institutions & contexts Methodist and Wesleyan United Kingdom · 2015

Methodist Church in Britain's Past Cases Review finds 1,885 abuse cases 1950-2014, roughly a quarter naming ministers or church employees

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Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Official finding

Authority role

Methodist ministers and lay church employees in pastoral and youth-work roles

Organization

The Methodist Church in Britain

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

The review's church-perpetrator subset concerns ministers and employees who held pastoral or youth-ministry authority over the congregants and children in their care; the finding is that fewer than a tenth of the 1,885 identified cases had ever reached police, and no comparable published national review of Methodist safeguarding existed before it.

Pastoral or clerical authority
Institutional obedience or isolation

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2015-05-01 · published independent past-cases review

Independent review commissioned by the Methodist Conference. The Past Cases Review identified 1,885 cases of sexual, physical, emotional and domestic abuse and neglect connected to the Methodist Church between 1950 and 2014. In approximately one quarter of these, a minister or lay church employee was identified as perpetrator or alleged perpetrator. Only 61 cases had involved police contact at the time, with 6 investigations still open as of publication. The Methodist Conference issued a full and unreserved apology and established an implementation group for the report's 23 recommendations.

Documented coercion mechanisms

pastoral and youth-ministry authority over congregants and children
institutional processes that referred only 61 of 1,885 cases to police at the time

Cited record

Sources

official report commission report 'Past Cases Review Report', The Methodist Church in Britain, 2015.: The Methodist Church's own publication of the Past Cases Review report and its findings.
institutional reporting press release 'Church issues full and unreserved apology to abuse survivors', The Methodist Church, 2015.: The Methodist Conference's apology accompanying the review's publication.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis: https://www.methodist.org.uk/safeguarding/courage-cost-and-hope-past-cases-review/news-article-and-past-cases-review-report/ Corpus classification: official-report; evidentiary role: commission-report. SHA-256 23dbd9f223ff7a98f512ae289bdcf733cbad7db127065af33645be48ada7a2e1
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
Source and tier basis: https://www.methodist.org.uk/about/news/church-issues-full-and-unreserved-apology-to-abuse-survivors/ Corpus classification: institutional-reporting; evidentiary role: press-release. SHA-256 9d0ab3b6c64db48051d4419e3ec8ece19b1584ec00480161a96c38056f5951eb
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger

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