A memo crying in the wilderness

I was recently struck by a Facebook comment in a thread beneath an article on the Church of England’s response to the Unite the Kingdom march. A poster had expressed anti-immigration sentiment, and the response she received was: “The Gospel is unconditional love for everyone, including the stranger — or didn’t you get the memo?” Quite apart from the substance of the argument, the language itself is revealing. It envisions Christianity not as revelation, mystery or prophecy, but as an updated policy brief from a moral HR department.

But perhaps that is merely one person’s unfortunate style of communication? Reading the Church Times article above the thread, I became less sure. It quotes from something called “The Church of England Bishops’ Working Group for Promoting Unity in our Nation”, which had shared a prayer giving thanks for those who “build up our common life”, asking God to help us “love all who call these islands their home”, and protect the nation from “the perils of division and hatred.” Even the Almighty Himself might struggle to tell whether this was the Church speaking, an NGO, or a Labour Party spokesperson.

The language is telling, but so too are the structures that produce it. Having survived twenty years inside academia, I recognise the instinct to form “working groups”. They exist to address operational or reputational problems within large institutions. They feel odd within Christ’s church. Surely the Church exists to remind us of biblical approaches to living problems, rather than simply mirroring the practices of institutional life?

The article goes on to discuss safe spaces, listening stations, and polling data. All of this feels considerably closer to the language of managerial and therapeutic governance than to that of discipleship.

Looking at the Church’s responses to many of the popular issues of the age, one increasingly encounters the lingo of administrators, facilitators and communications departments. We experience the Church less as a voice crying in the wilderness than as a purveyor of messages from the comms team.

Take a piece by Sue Willsher, the Diocese of London’s Net Zero Carbon Programme Lead. It is called, in a title somewhat less sturdily expressed than the Book of Proverbs, Hope is a Discipline. She writes that the Church should commit “to net zero, improving energy efficiency, and inspiring communities to act for creation and future generations.” So far, so quango.

She goes on to report from a National Emergency Briefing in Westminster, where “professors and other leaders” briefed “MPs, business leaders, faith voices, cultural and sport figures, and community leaders” about “the impacts of the growing climate and nature crises.” 

Where to begin? A good place might be Galatians 2:6, where St Paul affirms that “God accepteth no man’s person.” There is a palpable tension between Christianity and the spectacle of Caesar — for what else is Westminster? — briefing his intermediaries with an approved message for his subjects.

Similarly, in the resignation statement of Justin Welby and the various supplementary statements from the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of Stepney, one struggles to detect a single Biblical cadence. Instead, there is talk of “safeguarding failures” and the Makin Review, of “a more victim-centred and trauma-informed approach”, and of “wholesale changes in culture and leadership”. Again, these could just as easily be statements of the board of an NGO. 

Given that the resignation followed failures to address what Welby himself called “the heinous abuses of John Smyth”, one might expect at least some acknowledgment of sin and judgement — not least because the person the Church exists to worship and proclaim delivered one of His sternest warnings to those who corrupt the innocent.

None of this is to say that the Church should not be concerned with safeguarding procedures. Rather, it is to say that those procedures should emerge from a scriptural consciousness rather than the boilerplate language of corporate governance.

In the wake of the civil unrest following Axel Rudakubana’s murderous rampage in Southport, the Church of England Racial Justice Unit — another piece of machinery within the Church’s managerial bureaucracy — issued a prayer and a statement. The latter referred to the massacre as “the terrible tragedy of the murder of the three young girls.” Tragedy has become the default institutional word for acts involving deliberate human wickedness. Yet tragedy, in its original sense, implies an inevitable downfall arising from fate or fatal flaw. Murder is not tragedy. The Church would do better drawing not on the lexicon of Greek theatre but on the scriptural language of sin, evil and corruption. That might also help its Bishops to understand the visceral public anger such acts provoke.

The Unit’s statement goes on to suggest that faith has a role in “enabling us to emerge from crises”. Enabling is a quintessential management word. Universities are now  almost entirely concerned with enabling rather than teaching, learning or knowledge. Yet it is still surprising to see the Church use the term in conjunction with faith. The Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament feel very distant from the modern managerial idiom of enabling. Surely we turn to the Church precisely to escape the language of corporate and institutional management.

The architecture of Working Groups and Units suggests that the Church organises itself through the assumptions and nomenclature of bureaucratic governance. This may be the natural approach of contemporary corporations and institutions, but it was not the approach of Christ and His disciples. Imagine translating Christ’s “And I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church” into: “I select you as project lead on the Church Development Working Group” to grasp the absurdity. One suspects the gates of Hell might stand a better chance against such a Unit.

None of this would matter much if the Church were successfully renewing the Christian faith in England. Yet the recent deflation of claims of a “quiet revival” suggests an institution currently more adept at losing sheep than gathering them.

Managerial systems are deeply uncomfortable with transcendent and prophetic language

In the opening “Bard’s Song” of his illuminated book Milton, William Blake presents a strange trinity of figures: Palamabron, Rintrah and Satan. Satan is not a horned monster but a mild, polite and highly efficient administrator, presiding over the “Mills of Heaven” — systems of mechanical and bureaucratic order. The crisis begins when, out of soft and managerial “pity”, Satan persuades Palamabron to let him direct the Harrow of spiritual cultivation. Unsurprisingly, the system collapses. Yet Satan never repents or accepts responsibility. Instead, he expresses mildness, procedural concern, and injured sensitivity, while blame quietly shifts toward Rintrah, the figure of prophetic wrath and uncompromising truth.

Blake understood something many modern institutions do not: managerial systems are deeply uncomfortable with transcendent and prophetic language. They prefer facilitation, moderation, process and emotional management to apocalypse, judgement, miracles and the Resurrection. Increasingly, so does the Church. 

So, what exactly is the Church’s appeal?