Monthly Archives: February 2015

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Re-Reading the Green Report 5: Management

This is the fifth and last in my series of posts on the Green Report.  See the first, second, third, and fourth.

One of my friends (no fan of the Green Report himself) said in another context that good management is the institutional form that love takes.  You don’t need to spend much time in an organisation with well-meaning but incompetent management to know how true this is.  Of course, some talk about ‘good management’ is about control, about the reduction of human beings to units of resource that can be utilised efficiently in pursuit of key performance indicators.  But there is, nevertheless, such a thing as truly good management, where the ‘goodness’ involved has to do with clarity, honesty, openness, fairness and trustworthiness, and about rooting out the hidden forms of abuse, bullying and emotional blackmail that Christian organisations can be so good at hiding (or simply failing to see) when they assume that good intentions are enough.

The people who we believe are called to the specific kinds of ministry on which the Green Report focuses will normally have (amongst their many roles) responsibility for a large staff, large budgets and complex resources.  Good management is about taking with genuine seriousness the responsibilities to other people that come with these things – even if in some cases that will mean understanding them well enough to delegate them wisely.

In the FAOC report, we talk about the importance of such good management – and about its subordinate place.

A healthy account of leadership will focus first and most insistently on the nature of the collective practice concerned. In relation to the church, therefore, our starting point is the whole people of God as they are called to serve God’s mission in and for the world. The distinctive role of the leader can only be understood within and in relation to this calling of the whole people of God. The specific activities of leadership, together with the more generic processes of management, exist to assist, enable and inspire the people of God in their pursuit of this calling, and we should therefore take care that they are compatible with the church’s purpose and genuinely feed it. The processes that build a healthy organization (like finance and Human Resources) are absolutely vital to maintain the conditions that can allow the whole collective practice to function in the service of God’s mission, and their absence can seriously damage the church’s mission and ministry – but they are not ends in themselves. They are there, like leadership as a whole, only for the sake of the ministry and mission of the church. (§40)

Similarly, the Green Report says

the primary ordained leaders of the Church are priests, prophets, theologians, evangelists and heirs of the apostles. Alongside the apostolic call, bishops, like deans, are also responsible for extensive budgets and investment portfolios, for business and for process. (§29)

The problems of management do not define the ministries we are considering – but if they are not given attention, and if we do not equip ministers to understand and respond to them, they will with grim inevitability derail these ministries.  Getting this balance right, so that Bishops and Deans understand management well enough, and are skilled enough at it, to prevent themselves being turned into managers, is a delicate matter.

Business Schools and MBAs

The use of Business Schools in the delivery of the training (§34), and the offering of a Mini MBA (§34, 39), must not be allowed to re-order these priorities.  The training that is needed is training in ‘response to the presence of God in and through the community, calling us to act on its behalf as signs and agents of God’s love’ (§13), and includes elements of good management within that only because they are one of the forms that such loving action takes.

The training on offer must, therefore, not be a training in business management with theological elements tucked into it.  It must be, as a whole, theologically shaped and informed, and then, as necessary, include appropriate (and critically assessed) forms of training in management only as subordinate elements within that framework.  Partnership with a Business School need not be a problem, if it does not determine the ethos, direction, and parameters of the training in business terms, but simply offers a way to badge, validate, and administer a programme that is theologically framed, through and through.

And that’s me done, I think.  There are other things I could have written about – the shape of the church’s engagement with the wider world assumed in the Report, the ways in which it talks about growth – but I think I’ve already gone on more than long enough.

Re-Reading the Green Report 4: Discernment

This is the fourth in my series of posts on the Green Report.  See the first, second and third.

As discussed last time, we are thinking about some specific niches in the overall ecology of the Church’s ministry – Bishops and Deans in the first instance, but also various others roles with a particular kind of public visibility, or roles which require working on an unusually large  scale.  Those niches do exist in the life of the church, and they do from time to time need filling.  We do therefore need some processes by which we discern who will best fill those niches, and provide them with the support and development needed to fill them well.

These are not things that, on the whole, we currently do well.

The Green Report sketches a process for discernment, rightly aiming to be ‘more open to the emergence of leaders from a wider variety of backgrounds and range of skills than is currently predictable’ (§11), and to be more transparent and accountable.

The Nature of Discernment

As we think through whether and how the Report’s proposed new process might work well, it is worth keeping in mind various characteristics of discernment.

Discernment is (or should be) a corporate process; it is, fundamentally an activity of the whole church (see the FAOC report, §182).  It involves attentive looking, and the testing of what we see – and both of these are, finally, activities of the whole Body.  We open each others eyes to see better; we test each other’s discernments, and the truthfulness of our discernment emerges, God willing, from this interaction.  We are therefore charged with discovering how to keep our processes of discernment as open as possible to the challenging wisdom of the Body.

Discernment is (or should be) a process in which the church allows itself to be surprised. We are seeking to discern together the movement of the Spirit of God, not seeking ways to secure the continuation of our own plans.  Discernment is therefore properly a two-directional process.  On the one hand, there is the process of the church discerning who might be the right person to fit into the space we want to fill.  On the other, there is the process of discerning how our sense of the shape of that space might be changed by the people whom God is sending us.  It is a process in which the church is seeking to be discerning about itself and its future, as well as about the future ministries of specific individuals.

Discernment is (or should be) a spiritual discipline.  We are not the first generation or the only church to worry about discernment, and there is a good deal of wisdom to plunder from earlier generations and from other churches about how discernment might be handled well – about the patterns of prayer, the forms of self-examination, the practices of mutual accountability, that are proper to those most directly involved in discernment, and about the kinds of support from the wider body that they need.

Overseeing Discernment

A great deal of  the process set out in the Green Report rests upon the Development and Appointments Group (DAG), who are given the right to determine who participates in the process (§49).  Whether and how that process can work well will depend to a significant extent, therefore, on how DAG is asked to operate.

The first thing to say is that its remit is not to run a ‘Talent Pool’ (that language, as the report itself suggests, simply needs to go). It’s remit is to oversee the church’s discernment process in these instances.

Second, DAG will be overseeing just one discernment process amongst the many that the church needs – formal discernment processes like BAPs, the discernment involved in the allocation of different forms of CMD, the discernment of gifts and ministries in the local church, and so on.  (Once again, the Green Report only makes sense in the context of the other reports that have recently been published.)  Actually, it would probably be better to say that it is just one family of discernment processes amongst the many processes that the church needs.  There is only a rough and partial unity amongst the various ministries on which this process is focused, and only a very rough and very partial distinction of these from other, related ministries.

Third, DAG operates on behalf of the church as a whole, and it will need to find ways in which its work can be informed as richly as possible, and challenged as deeply as possible, by the discernment of others.  Some of this is set out in the Report’s discussion of how DAG will relate to diocesan processes.  DAG is there to gather and to reflect on (and be surprised and challenged by) the discernment of others – both about who they should be looking for and about what they should be looking for.  It also needs, of course, to be alert for cases where the discernment of others has been unimaginative or inattentive (including watching for unconscious bias, §62).  But it is there to search diligently, prayerfully and humbly for the signs of what God is doing, by listening long and hard to those around it in the church.  A DAG too convinced of its own patent remedies for the church’s ills would inevitably become undiscerning.

Fourth, DAG will need constantly to be open to challenge and to surprise.  Any list of criteria it uses (like those in Appendix 3 of the Report) need to be kept low key and heuristic, so as not to turn into a cookie cutter guaranteeing uniformity  of output.  DAG will need to cultivate an explicit ethos of looking at the margins – at the square pegs.  (As the Report says: ‘The Church must be more intentional about drawing in those with high potential who do not appear to “fit in”’, §11).  The language of monitoring, of evaluation, and of benchmarking can work against this.  Those words are capable of exerting a distorting gravitational pull which, at its worst, could lead to a deadening ethos of control – to a DAG that saw itself as a quality control mechanism on a production line.  A desire for control is, however, incompatible with true discernment.

Fifth, DAG will need to be very wary indeed of the lure of measurement.  In §14, the Report rightly says that ‘God’s wisdom is our measure of how we learn to manage better’; in §24 it speaks of ‘the measure of the full stature of Christ’.  In the light of these measures, we should be very reluctant indeed to give too high a role to supposedly objective measures of success.  As the FAOC report says,

It is always worth asking whether our descriptions of leadership can leave room for a leader who was abandoned by all his followers, who was stripped of all dignity and power, and whose ministry was in every measurable sense defeated – and where that failure was nevertheless the foundation stone of God’s mission. (§49)

There is simply no short cut to discernment.  The most readily available ‘objective’ measures of success by which we might compare candidates only achieve their comparability by having the narratives that make sense of them shorn away.  Discernment has to look at context; it has to look at the whole story – it has to take time and to risk wise judgment, rather than retreating to the safety of apparent objectivity, especially when it draws on apparently objective data.  But the work of discernment is always, at its deepest, the work of discovering how God is working amongst us – and that’s never going to be a process that we can make safe.

Sixth, DAG will need, if it is to live up to the best instincts of the Report, to give serious thought to how its own work can be grounded in prayer – not just in the prayerfulness of its individual members, nor simply in the opening and closing of its meetings with prayer, but in the recognition that its whole business is a form of prayer, a spiritual discipline.  We have, I suspect, a good deal to learn – from everyone from Jesuits to Quakers, as well as from our own tradition – about how such a form of prayer can flourish.  As Justin Welby has said, ‘If we want to see things changed, it starts with prayer. It starts with a new spirit of prayer, using all the traditions, ancient and modern’ – and there is ‘No renewal of the Church without renewal of prayer.’

 

Next time: Management

Re-Reading the Green Report 3: Leadership

This is the third in my series of posts on the Green Report.  See the first (which explains just what I think I’m up to) and the second (which focuses on prayer and confidence).

The Green Report has a great deal to say about ‘Leadership’.  The words ‘lead’, ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ and their derivatives turn up on every page of the main report.  In this post, I want to suggest some ways in which we can receive that emphasis – and repair some of the ways in which the report presents it.

Leadership in the Body

In the FAOC report, we looked at the rise and rise of leadership language in the Church (§§18–23), and concluded

that this language is not going away any time soon. It has simply become too prevalent and too deeply embedded, and we acknowledge that this is in part because it can name important needs in the church’s life. Rather than arguing about whether we should stop using leadership language, therefore, we discuss how this language might be used well… (§10)

because

It can only be right to make ‘leadership’ a central idea in the life of the church if our ideas and practices of leadership (whether inherited from earlier generations of the church or borrowed from elsewhere) are subjected to ongoing critical questioning in the light of the church’s relation to its Lord. (§168)

We claimed that it is

impossible to sustain a simple opposition between Christian and secular ideas of leadership. Our tradition has always been in the business of assimilating and transforming material from the world around it. Ultimately, all the language we use about leadership – whether we say ‘bishop’ or ‘leader’, ‘shepherd’ or ‘counsellor’, ‘servant leader’ or ‘deacon’, ‘prince’ or ‘priest’ or ‘elder’ – is language that has been borrowed, assimilated and transformed. The only interesting questions are about the kind and depth of the transformation and assimilation involved, not about the fact of borrowing itself. (§164)

What, though, do we mean by ‘leadership’?  We offered an ‘initial, low-key definition’:

We might say that a leader is someone who assists others in the performance of a collective practice. Such a leader is not necessarily one who himself or herself excels in the practice, though he or she certainly has to be competent in it. Rather, he or she will be good at participating in that practice in such a way as to draw others deeper into it. (§39)

If that is where we start, however, we immediately have to reject any simplistic division of the Body of Christ into ‘leaders’ and ‘led’.  Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:7 that ‘To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.’  We need each other; we are built up by each other; we assist each other in the growth and enactment of our faith.  Starting with the low-key definition of ‘leadership’ above, we would have to conclude (as a first move) that leadership is something in which we are all involved or called to be involved.

We shouldn’t have a division between leaders and led, but a complex ecology of multiple forms of assistance and encouragement, building up the whole body together.  (As we say in the FAOC report, ‘Even the ministry of oversight, of episkope, is first of all a ministry of all God’s people, who are called to exercise self-control and hold one another to account’ – §177.)  We can certainly recognise many forms of differentiation – different gifts, callings, talents distributed around the body – but they are all differentiations within a Body in which every member is called to minister.

The Green Report is focused on Bishops and Deans, but also talks about ‘heads of theological colleges, mission agencies, para-church networks or significant pilgrimage centres’ and leaders of ‘large churches with specially significant roles in national church life’ (§64).  If we start with the kind of vision of the Body of Christ sketched above, we won’t think of these people as ‘the leaders’ over against everyone else as ‘the led’.  We won’t think of them as people who have come out on top of some hierarchy of excellence or importance or value.  Rather, we will simply recognise that, in the midst of a Body in which every member is called to minister, some people have received a specific kind of calling which involves ministry to a large geographical area, or playing a significant role in relation to a large number of people, as well as (in some of those cases) playing specific sacramental roles and specific representative roles.  To be called into these roles is not promotion; it is not a form of elevation.  Even ‘seniority’ is potentially a very misleading word for it.  It is, rather, a call to occupy one specific niche in the overall ecology of the Church’s ministry.

Training specifically aimed at enabling the holders of these posts to develop in what they do will therefore need to strike a careful balance.  On the one hand, it does make sense, for some developmental purposes, to take them out of their contexts and bring them together as a cohort, in order for them to share the wisdom and experience they have gained in similar roles, and in order for them to receive appropriate training in how to face common challenges.  In the same way, we might bring together people involved in similar ministries in all sorts of other niches of the church’s ecology – there’s nothing specifically ‘senior’ about this idea.

On the other hand, we should guard against any sense that those being brought together are a breed apart, or even an elite, separating off into their own exclusive club.  They are brought together as a cohort for the sake of their distinctive contribution to the overall weave of ministry that they share with others, and in order to energise and refresh them for deeper engagement with those around them, wider collaboration, and a fuller sharing of the tasks of ministry.  The design of the programme of development, and of the patterns of prayer woven in with it, will need to work hard to protect against any sense of isolation or exclusivity.

Minding our Language

In the light of all this, there are elements of the Green Report’s language that do, I think, call for repair.

First, from time to time, the language it uses to discuss leadership can indeed suggest that readers are a race apart.  Take that word ‘cadre’, for instance, in the statement of purpose (§32).  The dictionary definition, ‘a small group of people specially trained for a particular purpose’, is not itself problematic, but it sounds to my ears all too like a group defined over against their surroundings (the group of army officers who have their own mess; the closed communist cell that is working against the surrounding bourgeois society).

Second, and more pervasively, the Report uses language that moves away from a simple differentiation of ministries and towards a hierarchy of value.  We are, it seems, looking for ‘exceptional individuals’ (§6), ‘candidates with exceptional potential’ (§10), ‘exceptional potential leaders from among the clergy’ (§12); people who demonstrate ‘exceptional performance’ (§49) – and so on.  It is hard not to read this as suggesting that we are looking for people who are better than others – the talent, over against the untalented mass.  It makes it sound like we are indeed talking about promotion, about climbing a hierarchy with the best and brightest at the top.

It is not just this language that needs changing, however – it is the whole tempting mind-set that it can encourage and express.  Yes, of course we are looking out for people who are exceptionally well suited for the specific ministries that we have in mind – but only in the sense that we might also look for people who are exceptionally well suited to be a welcomer at the church door, or who are exceptionally well suited to do staff the night shift at the homeless shelter, or who are exceptionally well suited to clean the church hall loos.  That is, we’re trying to discern together to what roles, to what forms of ministry, God is calling each person; where each person best fits in the activity of the body, in ways that will do most justice to the specific gifts – the specific talents – that God has given to each person.

That is why the Green Report rightly says that a Bishop or a Dean will be someone who ‘Recognises and develops unique gifts’ and who is ‘a creative steward of lay and ordained talent’ (§32); someone who will give priority to ‘Supporting the formation and development of individuals in the full range of their ministry’ (§10).  The Bishop or Dean is one minister in a whole church of ministers, a person with one peculiar set of talents amongst the talents of all those who make up the church.

That is also why the Green Report only makes sense as one report amongst many.  This one deals with some specific issues surrounding this particular kind of ministry; others deal with aspects of Continuing Ministerial Development, or with developing the ministries of all the baptised.  This isn’t the top of the pyramid; it is one small piece of the patchwork.

 

In my next post, I’m going to delve more deeply in to what the Report has to say about the processes of discernment and development by which we identify and train people for these peculiar roles.

Re-Reading the Green Report 2: God at the Centre

This is the second of my posts on The Green Report.  The first can be found here.

Faithful Improvisation

The main body of the report starts (in §10) by repeating, in slightly fuller form, the quote from Justin Welby given at the start of the introduction (§1).  It is a quote from his first address to the General Synod as Archbishop of Canterbury, in July 2013.  He spoke of the members of the Church being ‘Custodians of the gospel that transforms individuals and societies….called by God to respond radically and imaginatively to new contexts.’  That word ‘custodian’ suggests that we hold faithfully to what we have received; the reference to imaginative and radical response suggests that this faithfulness will be expressed in new ways in new contexts.

The idea here is the same as one of the ideas at the core of the Faith and Order report: ‘faithful improvisation’, which the Green Report quotes in §14.  In the FAOC report, we said (§§12–13) that compelling answers to questions about the kind of senior leadership needed by the Church of England

are not developed in the pages of reports. They are developed in situ, hammered out in context by Christians drawing deeply on the Scriptures, engaging with the tradition, attending to their situations, questioning and challenging and encouraging one another, and discovering prayerfully over time what bears fruit and what does not.  In other words, good answers to this question are produced by faithful improvisation, in the never-ending diversity of contexts in which the church finds itself. By ‘improvisation’, we do not mean ‘making it up as we go along’ or ‘bodging something together from the materials available’. Rather, we are drawing on the way that ‘improvisation’ has been written about by a number of theologians in recent years, and are using the word in something like the sense it can have in musical performance. Musicians who are deeply trained in a particular tradition (who know its constraints and possibilities in their bones) draw on all the resources provided by that formation to respond creatively to new situations and to one another. Compelling and faithful answers to the church’s questions about leadership require something of the same deep formation and deep attentiveness in situ, and will be similarly diverse and creative.

Rooted in Prayer

Deep rootedness in the gospel underpins our improvisation, or our imaginative and radical responses to new contexts.  The central form that the Green report suggests this rootedness will take is prayer.  It talks about the importance of the leaders’ ‘life of prayer’ (§10), a substantial element of prayer is built into the proposed patterns of training  (§35), and the diagram of ‘Leadership Characteristics for Bishops and Deans’ (§32) has at its top this statement of ‘purpose’: ‘Develop a prayerful cadre of Bishops and Deans who are confident as leaders and evangelists who release an energy for mission and growth across the Church, as the urgent priority set by the Gospel’  (see also §10).  I’m going to come back to various aspects of this statement later, including that word ‘cadre’ and the idea of releasing energy for mission and growth.  For now, however, I want to keep the focus on prayer, and take the report at its word: the highest priority, the first element in its purpose, is a call for leaders to be ‘prayerful’.

The FAOC report (§174) speaks of

constant, prayerful, humble and attentive listening by the whole church, and especially by those who exercise leadership within it, to what the Spirit may be saying to God’s people. Wise improvisation in leadership will therefore only emerge from communities and individuals gathered by the Spirit in sustained prayer and worship, with the Son, before the Father.

All our action, including any action we call ‘leadership’, is a joining in, a participation in what God is doing.  As the FAOC report says elsewhere, ‘one’s action is a gift that one receives more than it is something that one achieves; [and] there can be no effectiveness without grace’ (§48).

Prayer is the starting point not simply because we need to seek guidance before acting, or to recharge batteries before expending energy.  It is the starting point because our agency – our determination, our endeavour, our action – is never primary.  Our vision of ministry, and of leadership within it, should not begin with any picture of heroic activity on the part of those who minister, but of deep and abiding receptivity and attentiveness.  To minister is to be acted upon by God, to be caught up in what God is doing in and through us.  Its centre is not labour (though there is almost certain to be labour involved), but our rest in God.  Prayer is therefore necessarily the centre of ministry, including of all those forms of ministry we call leadership.

The training programme promised by the Green Report has prayer and reflection as one of its major components.  To fulfil its promise, however, that needs to be more than simply a space for prayerful reflection on what has been learnt.  Rather, central to the substance of the training, there will need to be a focus upon developing the kinds of habit of prayer, the kinds of community of prayer, the kinds of rule of prayerful life, that can underpin the kinds of ministry envisaged.

Confidence

When the report speaks of ‘confidence’ (as in ‘a prayerful cadre of Bishops and Deans who are confident as leaders and evangelists’), we should read this first of all not as self-confidence, but as confidence in God.  As §15 says, ‘This confidence is rooted entirely in the victory of Christ.’  It is the confidence that flows from prayer, and so from trust in God, from rest in God.  But God’s action and our action are not in competition, and to focus on God’s action does not mean that we have to deny our own.  God’s action enables, accompanies and directs our own, and a primary confidence in God is compatible with a secondary confidence in ourselves – what the Green report calls a ‘realistic confidence’ in our ability (§13) – a thankfulness for the gifts that God has given us, a practiced knowledge in their possibilities and limits, and a joy in their exercise.

Our confidence in ourselves is, however, bounded by our confidence in God.  Our self-confidence must never become a conviction that we are the centre of what is going on.  It has to be a self-confidence that remains attentive to what God is doing beyond us and without us, ready for surprises, and open to correction.  It has to be a self-confidence that does not let us take ourselves too seriously.  As the report says, ‘We want leaders so centred on God that they exhibit neither neurosis nor narcissism’  (§17) – and finding that balance in the context of a demanding ministry is a serious spiritual discipline – and, again, exploration of this will need to be en element of the training offered.

Do Not Fear

Our self-confidence should also never become a conviction that the future is ours to command.  The FAOC report says

The growth of God’s kingdom is in God’s hands. We must pray all we can, learn all we can and work all we can, but these are not handles that need only to be turned hard to guarantee success.  (§185)

Our future is in God’s hands.  That does not mean that we don’t need to act strenuously in the present, but it does mean that we need to act not out of anxiety and panic, but out of trust: wholehearted reliance upon God.

One aspect of the ‘culture change’ that the Green report speaks of (§8) is therefore a move away from a culture of anxiety.  On the one hand, that means a move away from a culture of communal anxiety about the future of the Church – as if everything depended upon us.  On the other hand, it means a move away from a culture of individual performance anxiety – as if the one thing needful is to make a success of ourselves, to demonstrate our worth by what we achieve.  Confidence in God is the root of a move away from such ecclesial Pelagianism – and it is the root of the joy, resilience, energy, and hope of which the Green Report speaks (§12).

The Green Report warns against the aversion to risk that can flow from the belief that we can manage risk away (§22).  Instead, the church needs ‘spaces of safe uncertainty in which creative and emotionally intelligent change can happen.’  A move away from a culture dominated by anxiety and control is necessary if faithful improvisation is going to flourish.  Micromanagement kills improvisation; insecurity kills improvisation; fear of failure, the need to perform, the obsession with targets, all kill improvisation.

Promoting ‘safe uncertainty’ means refusing a culture focused on success.  As we said in the FAOC report:

We therefore have to cultivate a culture that allows failure, that attends to it carefully and learns from it seriously, but that does not condemn it. In part, this is because we will certainly not encourage real improvisation and experimentation if we have generated an atmosphere of performance anxiety; improvisation is only made possible by trust. More seriously, however, it is because any understanding of Christian leadership that believes success to be firmly in the grasp of good leaders, rather than in the hands of God, has become a form of idolatry. The one true leader of the church is God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and true success is in God’s hands alone.  (§186)

Releasing Energy

The statement of purpose at the top of the Report’s diagram of Leadership Characteristics (§32) speaks of leaders who ‘release an energy for mission and growth across the Church, as the urgent priority set by the Gospel’.  In the light of all I have been saying, we will read this not as the high-octane energy of the big leader, but as the energy that flows in each of us from a confident, trusting participation in what God is doing, grounded in prayer.

As that word ‘release’ might suggest, this is not an energy that some of us possess and then distribute to others.  Neither, however, is it simply an energy independently found in each of us.  Our relationships of trust and confidence in God are never simply about the individual and God.  We encourage one another, we build one another up, and we are involved in one another’s relation to God.  That is what it means to be a body.  The Spirit’s work in each of us is inseparable from the Spirit’s work in those around us, and we can therefore all be involved in the ‘release’ of energy of the Spirit in those around us.

The Green report does not simply talk about mutual encouragement, however.  It talks about a cadre of leaders who will be engaged in this work of encouragement.  If I am to take this project of retrieval and repair further, I need to tackle that next.

Re-Reading the Green Report 1: Suspicion, Retrieval and Repair

In December, the Green Report (more formally, the Report of the Lord Green Steering Group, or ‘Talent Management for Future Leaders and Leadership Development for Bishops and Deans: A New Approach’) was leaked, to the accompaniment of a fountain of criticism (and a splash or two of defence) in blogs, comment pieces, and letters pages.  (It has also now been published as a Synod paper, with an introductory summary.)

(See the initial Church Times report; see also the various collections of responses gathered by the Thinking Anglicans blog.)

My aim in writing now, as a latecomer to this party, is not to try to get that debate flowing again.  Instead, I want to try something a little different.  Rather than setting out yet another critique, I want to try for retrieval and repair.  This first post will try to explain what I mean.  I plan a few more posts, over the next few days, to try and put this retrieval and repair into practice.

Suspicion

All sorts of criticisms were levelled at the report after it was leaked, but most prominent among them were those which saw in it the triumph of corporate language over theology, or of business culture over the culture of the church, or of managerialism over Christian wisdom.

It is not hard to see where this criticism comes from.  The corporate language starts on the title-page – indeed, in the first two words on the title page: ‘Talent Management’.*  And when readers whose critical senses have been alerted by that title turned to the Introduction, it is not hard to see how their suspicions might have deepened.  The first paragraph is confidently, if briefly, theological.  It quotes Justin Welby speaking about our being ‘Custodians of the gospel’ and ‘called by God’.  That initial theological note immediately vanishes, however.  From the next sentence on, we are in the realm of ‘leadership development’, ‘talent management initiatives’, and the engagement (to develop detailed proposals for these initiatives) of the former ‘Head of Talent and Learning at BP’.  It was therefore inevitable (and entirely predictable) that, by the time they reached §8, the report’s claim that its recommendations ‘mark a culture change for the leadership of the Church’, most readers will have seen the change in question precisely as a takeover of the church by the habits and language of the corporate world.

This opening actively invites a suspicious reading of the report.  In fact, it does more than invite, it all but demands it.  The choice of title; the way the introduction has been put together; the brusque transition from §1 to §2 – it all says, as Martyn Percy said in his critique in the Church Times, that what is ‘on offer is a dish of basic contemporary approaches to executive management, with a little theological garnish’.

By the time the reader reaches the body of the report, just over the page, the damage is already done.  That body contains strands of theological language and recognisably theological ideas woven in with strands of management language and borrowed corporate ideas.  Having reached it via the introduction, many readers will inevitably see the corporate strands as central, and see the theological strands as twisted around them – whether as decoration or disguise or inadequate amelioration.  In practice, that means that they will take the specific proposals (§§33–78) as bearing the main weight of the report, and see the discussion of ‘principles and context’ (§§10–29) as secondary – to be read, rather sceptically, in the light of the later proposals.

Retrieval and Repair

My claim is not that the suspicious reading is wrong. Much of the language and argument of the remainder of the report lends itself very well to being read in this suspicious way – and the suspicious reading is powerful, penetrating and worrying. I do not, however, think that the suspicious reading is the only thing that can be done with this report.  I have said that the report is woven from multiple strands, including ‘strands of theological language and recognisably theological ideas’.  I want, in my subsequent posts, to try the experiment of flipping the suspicious reading over, and seeing what happens when one takes the theological strands as central.  I’m not ignoring the critical readings – I have learnt a great deal from them – I am simply doing something different.  I am attempting a ‘retrieval’.

This retrieval also involves ‘repair’.  There are times, I will suggest, when the report resists being read around its theological strands.  There are indeed times when its managerial language pulls hard against the retrieval I am attempting.  There are moments when I am forced to say that if I want to re-read the report in the way I am suggesting, I will have to refuse some of the specific language it uses.  Just as the suspicious reading is forced to say of some of the theological material in the report that it is undermined or evacuated or denied by the corporate content, so I am forced to say from time to time that some of the corporate content is called seriously into question by the theological content.

I suggest, however, that this very task of repair is one that the report itself encourages.  Very close to the end, in §85 (far too late for the suspicious reading to take seriously), the report notes that it has used ‘corporate labels such as “talent management”, “leadership development programme”, “talent pool” and “alumni network”’, and acknowledges that ‘these should perhaps be replaced by terms meaningful to the Church’.

So, over the next several posts, in line with that last recommendation. I am going to attempt a retrieval and repair of the report.  I do not claim that, in so doing, I am identifying what the intentions of the reports’ authors really were, nor do I claim that I am running counter to their intentions.  I am simply not playing the kind of interpretive game that involves me in that task of excavating intentions.  I am, rather, exploring one way of receiving and responding to the report – a way of making something of it that I think it does make possible, even if it is not something that it demands.  So I don’t ask, ‘What were they really up to, the Lord Green Steering Group?  Rather I ask, ‘What should we be up to, now we have this report in front of us?  How can we best live with it?’

Full Disclosure

I’m on the Faith and Order Commission.  I’m therefore one of the co-authors of the report Senior Church Leadership: A Resource for Reflection, published in January, which tackles some of the same territory as Green, but from a very different angle and with a very different remit.  There was some discussion and consultation between members of the two groups, and the FAOC report is cited in the Green Report, but I wasn’t involved in the writing of the latter.  I’m not writing these thoughts on behalf of the Green group or anyone on it, nor on behalf of FAOC or anyone on it.  Of course, my thinking in this area has inevitably been shaped by the work we did in FAOC and the conversations we had with people involved in the Green group, but these are entirely my own personal ramblings, and nobody else bears responsibility for them.  You could however, plausibly take my proposal as an attempt to read the Green report in the light of the FAOC report.


* Of course, the word ‘talent’ travelled from referring to a particular weight of gold or silver, to meaning an divinely entrusted gift to be used wisely, and so to meaning a capacity for success in some sphere of endeavour, by way of Jesus’ parable in Mt 25:14–30.  In other words, we do owe the word ‘talent’ in the title of this report ultimately to the Bible.