Missionaries, not management consultants.

The dust is only just beginning to settle from General Synod. I know it might sound preposterous to talk about the Church of England’s parliament in terms redolent of a gunfight in the Old West: gunfights in the Old West were often conducted in a friendlier spirit.

There were the usual vicious fights about sex, as bishops said one thing and then voted in a completely different way. There was an exceptionally unedifying scrap over a report into the State of Israel, which has possibly done serious harm to interfaith relationships. There was even a bit of rancour about Net Zero. A full house for 2026 Britain!

It is often said that the Church doesn’t represent the nation any more. Au contraire: this Synod showed it was the perfect mirror to the badly governed, divided and petty nation which it seeks to serve. 

Perhaps the most divisive aspect of it, still filtering down amongst the clergy and the laity, was the Synod’s decision to “take note” of a report into the culture of mistrust in the Church. The report itself was staggering. Its field work was done among Diocesan Secretaries and lay chairs, choosing to make these insiders representative of the whole laity. It laid the blame firmly at the doors of those on the ground — parish volunteers and ordinary clergy were at fault for not being “willing to implement policy”.

If I had wanted to implement policy I would have gone elsewhere, to a much better paid job with far less invasive hours, a more coherent structure that might enable me to have more quality time with my family.  Management consultancy is not, I suspect, vocational in the way the priesthood is, but it at least has regulated work hours. But I neither want to implement policy nor do I believe it is what God has called me to do. I don’t, for what it’s worth, think it’s what bishops or other senior clergy are called to do either. 

I think this embrace of managerialism, just as it becomes more despised and discredited elsewhere, is fundamentally a retreat into something comforting. In their hearts, I don’t think the people who lead — or rather govern — the Church of England know what it’s for. As with successive governments and myriad other public institutions, process becomes the goal because the people involved in leadership don’t know what the goal is. To its credit, the report identified this as an issue. Its author, Veronica Hope Hailey, told delegates that “Thoughtful institutions do not begin the work of reform by deploying management consultants.” Their starting point was instead “to go back to their core philosophy”. The problem is nobody in charge seems to be able to say what that is.

I do know what the core philosophy of the Church of England is — or what it should be — as do thousands of other priests and millions of ordinary lay people across the country. It is to show the love of God in Christ to particular people in a particular place at a particular time. 

Everything the central church does, from finances, to policy documents, to just its public output feels as if it exists to stymie that aim. Even if it isn’t meaning to be, the Church of England capital C and E is proving to be a massive barrier to the mission of the Church of England on the ground. 

Of course there is a diocesan lottery to the extent to which this hampers the work of a parish priest. Each of the 42 dioceses of the Church of England have differing degrees of willingness or ability to shield their parishes from the excesses of the centre. Many in my own diocese, Oxford, struggle to see what the fuss is about. We have the best safeguarding team in the country, an acting Bishop who is pastoral and with excellent priorities, the financial demands on us from the centre have been frozen or subject to the minimum possible increase each year. But the truth is that this is a) not true across the country, as those ministering in Leicester or Truro or Liverpool will tell you and b) that isn’t what people think of when the think of the central Church. They think instead of the hectoring, the hypocrisy and the headlines. That is why they don’t trust the institution. 

The report is correct that the lack of trust is increasingly corrosive to the Body of Christ in this country

The report is correct that the lack of trust is increasingly corrosive to the Body of Christ in this country. But it has identified the opposite solution to the one required, blaming in the report the unwillingness of the very people who keep the show on the road locally to get with the programme set from above. The continued alienation of these people by a Church hierarchy which seems to believe that its lack of reflection or repentance is a virtue, could have very serious ramifications- constitutionally, spiritually and politically. They will, eventually, get fed up of the gaslighting and the lack of appreciation. Put another way: if you tell someone they should be management consultants, someday they might just go away and become one.

Whether or not you believe in God or attend Church, the history is clear. The good state of the Church of England has been one of those imperceptible building blocks of the nation’s prosperity, peace and civility. Saying that we can now just do without it is an exceptionally rash and historically ill informed risk to be prepared to accept.

The lack of trust in this, the institution par excellence of the nation ought to be a matter of national concern. The Church of England is in a bad state and it is increasingly clear that it cannot be trusted to appoint the leaders or engender the culture required to get itself out of that mess. That isn’t just an internal Church problem but, once again, shows that the Church’s problems are the nation’s too.

Why is it incapable of the change required? Well, its solutions- —more process, more heavy handedness, more treating of clergy and laity as naughty children who must be punished until morale improves — are exactly the wrong solutions. Partly because they’ve been tried for the last 25 years and they don’t work and partly because they aren’t credible from a (even basically) theologically informed point of view. Every time one of these reports comes out it transpires it’s accidentally endorsed a 3rd century heresy or succeeded in mentioning “management” more than Jesus Christ. It needs prophets but it favours managers. These are increasingly not credible ways to run a business or a secular institution in a world which sees through such language- they are definitely not credible ways to point to the fullness of the mystery of God.

And credibility matters. Christ’s most consistent criticism of the Scribes and Pharisees, the religious authorities of his day, is that they are hypocrites. That their behaviour means the demands they make upon the behaviour of others are not credible. This is the exact situation we are now in within the Church of England. It just isn’t credible for the Church to claim it needs more money centrally and then continue with its increasingly deranged commitment to Project Spire. It isn’t credible for it to lecture parishes on safeguarding and then have bishops mark their own homework and clear one another of wrongdoing. It isn’t credible for dioceses and central church institutions to keep expanding their staff while they tell parishes they don’t deserve a priest. It isn’t credible for the centre to continue telling the edges that it is better at directing the training and funding and direction of the future of the Church when they so consistently get all of those things wrong.

Herein is the crux of the issue: there is a gulf between what is asked of the edges by the centre and what the centre demands of itself, which is the single biggest contributor to the lack of trust. And that lack of trust means a lack of authority — why should parishes listen to bishops and managers who back initiatives which seem to fly in the face of what they tell people on the ground? This situation will only get worse as morale worsens and assets diminish. The Church is basically only functioning because of good will: there is only so much more of that available for the House of Bishops, the Archbishop’s Council and the General Synod to squander.

Anybody who brings this up is branded a troublemaker, a “rascally voice”, to quote Justin Welby. But if he had been willing to listen to more dissenting voices he might not have ended his archepiscopate in the manner that he did. Yet Welby’s departure increasingly appears, as so many of us feared, to have been purely superficial. From the central church institutions there is still a flurry of reports into reports, an ecstasy of fumbling “process”, there are all the marks of a sclerotic managerial system in its death throes. But there is nothing theological, nothing discernibly or uniquely Christian: there is no reflection, no repentance, no appeal to pray and reflect, no focus on word or sacrament, just reams and reams of paper. If the central Church, truly, seriously wants to restore trust, then it has to start putting faith in the Word, body and blood and stop putting faith in paper.

One of the main reasons I stay, and why I still have hope, is that Christianity actually has an impressive and effective remedy to all this. It’s called confession and absolution. It’s the necessary start of any redemption arc. And when it happens the Christian response is to accept it in love. If the General Synod wants to know how to remedy the lack of trust felt by the general public — and indeed by the Church on the ground — for The Church of England centrally then it has to begin by the latter institution admitting that it has got things wrong. That the its slavish devotion to management and process over people is wrong. That its failure to listen is wrong. That its processes and policies and projects have very often been wrong. That the impression it gives that some people are not welcome due to the way they vote or think is wrong. That it’s contempt for people on the ground- deliberate or otherwise but felt throughout the country- is wrong. 

I don’t want to go and be a management consultant. I still believe that I am called to be a parish priest. I and other rascally voices don’t raise them because we like trouble, or because we seek the Church’s detriment. We raise them because we want to score points or settle scores. We raise them because we love the Church and desperately wish to see it succeed. It is a Church so many of us want to trust, in the idea of which so many of us believe, and despite so much of what it says and does, so many of us still lovingly serve. All we want is the consideration that the ideology that has defined its public persona and actions for the last two decades or so might have been wrong. All that would take would be a “sorry” – the same thing that we say to God every single Sunday. It isn’t much, but the hierarchy can just even begin to consider that, then we will throw ourselves behind efforts to try, once again, to be the Church of England.