Everyone who knows the Reverend Dr Bernard Randall attests to his intellectual vigour, kindness, tolerance and patience – qualities the Anglican church would no doubt prefer all its clerics possessed, though by no means all do.
With the Church of England facing abuse scandal upon abuse scandal, spend an hour in the company of the Oxford graduate and former Cambridge University director of theology and it's hard not to conclude he is the kind of man the beleaguered institution needs now more than ever.
But for the past six years, Dr Randall, 52, has been on a Church of England blacklist, a casualty of the culture wars – a victim, as he sees it, of a grave injustice and 'a perfect storm of failings'.
As it stands, were he to try to preach at a CofE church, he could face legal sanction. His crime? As The Mail On Sunday exclusively revealed in 2021, Dr Randall, school chaplain at Trent College in Derbyshire, simply gave a sermon to pupils, telling children they did not have to accept LGBT ideology – upholding, he says, the Church's own teachings on marriage.
Bizarrely, the independent school, which has a long Anglican tradition, secretly referred Dr Randall to the Government's anti-radicalisation programme Prevent following the 2019 sermon – and later sacked him. Less bizarrely, Prevent saw no reason to take any action against him. Nor did several other official bodies which later considered his case.
