by the Revd Dr Charlie Bell, Fellow at Girton College Cambridge, Assistant Curate, St John the Divine, Kennington and a consultant to the LLF Implementation Pastoral Guidance Working Group
Every so often, it’s no bad thing for institutions to take a step back and ask themselves some searching questions about the state of things. How are we perceived? Where might the obvious and less obvious issues lie? What are we doing well, and what are we doing not so well? To what extent are we achieving what we hope to achieve and where can we do better?
It feels to me that the Church of England is well overdue this kind of stock take. We seem to be an institution quite heavily invested in (at least what we think are) contemporary theories of management and leadership, yet it seems fascinating that we don’t – at least publicly – invest in the quite simple forms of self-critical review that would really help us in our mission and ministry.
A particular example of where things quite simply are not going well for us in the Church of England is in the area of transparency. Transparency is absolutely key to effective institutions – and this is ever more the case. It’s a complicated business – we might think that we are being transparent, yet if the perception is that we’re not, then we have a problem. Transparency is linked to so many other things – questions of transparency cast light on how decisions are being made, and who makes them, and also say something about who we are, or who we believe that we are, as a church. An institution that lacks transparency might be superficially strong and ensure power stays in certain hands, but this is no serious way to go about business, and is simply building up trouble for the future. I fear this is the track we are currently on.
In writing this, I know that there will be people who immediately get defensive and angry that their best intentions are being questioned. There are hundreds of good and serious people in the church – from bishops to church employees – who are doing their best and doing so with integrity. As a church, we have to move away from our current position, where any challenge is taken as a personal attack – and perhaps, too, those of us who do find the church’s lack of transparency increasingly frustrating need to find new ways of addressing our concerns. But what seems clear, from even the briefest of surveys of those who express frustration at the way the church is currently run, is that part of the problem is that there is nowhere to address those concerns – and any concerns that are expressed fall on deaf ears and, frequently, slammed doors. One of the reasons, perhaps, why the sessions of Questions at meetings of General Synod are so fraught is that this can feel like one of the few places where such concerns can be spoken and, sometimes, heard.
Combined, then, with this lack of transparency, is a sense of almost total, paralysing powerlessness amongst ordinary churchgoers and clergy. It is absolutely the case that many now speak of ‘the church’ as though it is an entity which does things to them, rather than of which they form a part. And who can blame them?
Many years ago, well before I was ordained, one of the little games I liked to play was to try to get to the bottom of who, precisely, was issuing statements as ‘the Church of England’. ‘The Church of England said X’ was a common refrain, and one that was as meaningless then as it is now. It was surprisingly difficult to find out the answer on occasion – it still is. Yet how, and why, has this situation been allowed to continue?
I’m not a fool – I understand that there is the need for occasional careful comms management, and that there is a complexity to some decision-making which can pass a mere curate like me by. Yet our lack of transparency is not an occasional concern – it’s our regular modus operandi. Decisions made and communicated by ‘the church’ are more often than not mired in some kind of mystery – and with little opportunity for constructive feedback or comment. There seems to be an almost iron-willed refusal to let the light into these decision-making processes, and whilst there are always leaks about what is ‘really going on’, this is quite simply an inadequate way of running any institution – and certainly one that is built on the foundation stone of truth. We need only look to the last few weeks to get a glimpse of this reality. And the institution’s far-too-frequent use of silence is deafening – and dangerous – as is the refusal to put our hands up when we get things wrong.
The thing is, until we admit that there is a problem, nothing is going to change. I know that it’s frustrating for senior people to hear irrelevant nobodies like me carping on about the problems in the system, but just on occasion, it might be worth listening to us – and I’m not alone. It’s without doubt that the Anglican Twittersphere is – just on occasion – a hellhole, but might we not start to ask questions about why that is? Institutions in which people feel empowered do not have senior leaders taking to social media to raise concerns. There is a genuine problem, here, and it’s time people who can started to do something about it.
As a church, we need to commit ourselves to undertaking a serious spiritual health check. For all the warm words, our church culture is still one of deference – albeit not necessarily one in which that deference is traditionally oriented. We are expected to have decisions made about us without us, and not to complain about them. We are expected to wait for statements about issues of genuine concern – sometimes for months – and then be grateful for the scraps that are issued. We are expected to simply accept new and bewildering funding formulas rather than play any serious part in their design. We are expected to trust and respect an institution – but those two things are, quite properly, earned.
Of course, this will all likely be dismissed as the complaints of an awkward nobody. Yet I truly believe that if we don’t do this, then the current period of bloodletting in the church is not going to simply fade away – although the church might. The risk, of course, is that the more transparent we are, the clearer it will become that our structures are not fit for purpose, that our accountability leaves a lot to be desired, that our laity and parish clergy – far from being empowered – are frequently left raging against a machine that doesn’t appear to either hear or care about them. But that is a risk worth taking, because most of us who are frustrated by how things are want the church to be better, not destroyed.
It takes courage to name a problem if you’re in charge – much easier to buy into the Emperor’s new clothes. If we are truly committed to being a safe and healthy church, it’s time to drop the comfort of denial and get on with building something better.
Any thoughts?