Vicar ‘spiritually abused’ boy who was forced to pray

A VICAR has become the first to be found guilty of spiritual abuse after he tried to stop a teenage boy seeing his girlfriend.

The Rev Timothy Davis, vicar of Christ Church Abingdon, Oxon, was found to be guilty of misconduct after a tribunal found that his “intense mentoring” of the boy between 2012 and 2013 amounted to abuse.

The disciplinary tribunal found that he had “sought to control” the boy’s life “by the use of admonition, Scripture, prayer and revealed prophecy”.

Nightly one-on-one mentoring sessions, which lasted for up to two hours, took place unsupervised in the boy’s bedroom, it said.

The abuse lasted for 18 months, when the boy was aged 15 and 16.

Davis would become angry if the boy did not come to his services because he was with his girlfriend. He called her “evil” and her family “bad seed” and “poisonous”, quoting Matthew’s Gospel to support his claims.

The boy, who cannot be identified, told the tribunal that Davis hugged him while crying, which he found “uncomfortable” and he was forced to pray with him morning and evening because he was told “God was saying that is what I should do”.

The pair went for dinner in Oxford, to London to see Les Misérables and to the cinema in Didcot. The boy said he found the mentoring “too intense but he found it impossible to tell [Davis] that he wanted less contact”.

His mother said she did not try to end his relationship with her son as “she was scared of going against God”.

She was initially “angry” at people who criticised the vicar and it took a year for her to realise that his behaviour was “not right”, she said.

Davis said he had been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, had been encouraged by the boy’s parents and hugged him “only in the context of celebrating GCSE results and on one occasion when [the boy] hugged him and said thank you”.

The tribunal said Davis was an “unreliable” witness who was guilty of “abuse of spiritual power and authority”.

The judgment said: “[The boy] was 15/16 doing his GCSES and [Davis] was a vicar in his 50s leading a very large and successful church: the imbalance in the relationship is obvious.”

There was “no suggestion of any sexual touching”, it added.

A penalty will be decided on in the coming weeks, the most serious being removal from office and being barred from working as a vicar again.

A spokesman for the Diocese of Oxford said it fully supported the findings of the tribunal.