The trouble started in June 2019. A pupil at Trent College had submitted a question asking why students were being told they "have to accept" gender identity teaching that the school had brought in through an outside group called Educate and Celebrate, an organization that stated its own goal was to "smash heteronormativity" in schools. Dr. Randall, then the school's chaplain, answered that question in a sermon titled "Competing Ideologies," laying out an orthodox Christian understanding of sex and identity alongside the newer teaching the pupils had received.
For that sermon, Trent College forced him out. Without his knowledge, the school reported him to Prevent, the British government's counter-terrorism referral program, on a claim of "religious extremism." The Diocese of Derby then listed him as a safeguarding risk, a designation that follows a clergyman for life and closes the door to parish ministry.
Four bodies eventually reviewed the case: Prevent itself, the Local Authority Designated Officer, the Disclosure and Barring Service, and the Teaching Regulation Agency. Every one of them cleared him, finding no ongoing safeguarding concern. Trent College was ordered to pay him £20,000 in costs, and under the settlement he is now eligible for Permission to Officiate — free, after seven years, to preach in a church again and to work in a school.
A Long Wait for the Truth to Stand
Seven years is a long time to carry a false label. Seven years of a man's name sitting on a list next to words like "risk" and "extremism," for the crime of telling teenagers what the church he served has taught for two thousand years. Somewhere in that stretch of years there were mornings Dr. Randall must have wondered if the truth would ever catch up to the lie that had been filed against him. My friend, that is the loneliest kind of waiting there is — not waiting for an answer, but waiting for people in authority to simply admit what was true all along.
Here is the good news for every soul who has ever stood up and told the truth and paid for it: the Lord Jesus already told His own that this would happen, and He told them not to be surprised by it.
"Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 5:10)
Notice He did not say blessed are they who avoid the trouble. He said blessed are they who get run through the mill for standing on what is right, because that is exactly where the kingdom of heaven shows up strongest. A chaplain answers a boy's honest question with the truth of Scripture, and for that he is treated like a terrorist. That is not a new story. It is the same story as a prophet dropped in a well, an apostle chained in a Roman cell, and a Savior nailed to a beam of wood for saying "I am the way, the truth, and the life."
The world has always had a hard time with people who will not trade the truth for comfort. It called such people troublemakers, extremists, bigots — whatever word fits the age. But the Lord who sees in secret does His own accounting, and in His own time He brings the truth out into the light where everyone can see it, just as it happened this month for a chaplain in Derbyshire.
"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." (John 8:32)
That freedom is not only a legal settlement or a cleared record. It is the deeper freedom of a conscience that never once had to bend to keep its job or its reputation. Every believer alive today will, in some measure, be asked whether he will speak what the culture wants to hear or what God has already said. The seven years it may cost you are not wasted years. They are the years the Lord uses to prove, to you and to everyone watching, that His word was never bound in the first place — and never will be.