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.

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