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Sunday 22 January 2012

Transforming Presence







Yesterday I was at Transforming Presence: Time to Talk, a well organised diocesan consultation on the strategic priorities for the Diocese of Chelmsford over the next fifteen years. These are intended to begin a continuing and widespread discussion of how we better become the church God wants us to be, and are better able to serve God’s world.
We discussed our best experiences of church, three words for the essentials of Church (I came up with creative, Christ-shaped community), what inspired and challenged us in the Transforming Presence document, and created headlines and news stories for the Church as we imagine it may be in 2025. While the document recognises some of the challenges which the Diocese faces, the event was predominantly upbeat meaning that my suggestion of 'Survival is success' as a headline wasn't picked up by the group of which I was part. To give the group their due though, we did grapple with real issues in the headline we eventually chose - 'Church accepts equality - 40 years too late!'
The strategic priorities identified by Transforming Presence - inhabiting the world distinctively, evangelizing effectively, and serving with accountability - are valuable but do seem to need some further unpacking or development.
One point that was particularly well made on our table was that it is hard to identify anything that is distinctively Christian about the way that we live both in the sense that our lives are often little different to those of others around us and also in the sense that most aspects of the way we aspire to live as Christians can also be found in other wisdom/faith traditions. The question to be addressed then is in what sense can it be said that these things are distinctively Christian if they are also found outside of Christianity? It may be that we would be better to speak of inhabiting the world ‘Christianly’ (if such a word exists), as opposed to distinctively.

Additionally, the document, in my view, needs to place a stronger emphasis on the practical outworking of faith in all forms of social action. At present, social action only seems to feature as an aspect of serving with accountability and should be given greater prominence, particularly in the light of many current mission initiatives which combine evangelism and social action.

My major concern with the document and its linked paper, Transforming Leadership, is that the analysis of the structural issues faced by the Diocese and Church of England is inadequate. The talk is of eradicating the sense of a ‘them’ and ‘us’ divide between parishes and diocese, where the diocese is seen as part of the Church of England’s top down, hierarchical, bureaucratic and, increasingly, managerial structures. My view is that this is a smoke-screen that we (priests and parishes) use to defend our individualism which in turn is fostered by structures which give exceptionally high levels of autonomy to us.

Those who have worked in generally hierarchical organisations will acknowledge immediately that the Church of England, while having its own hierarchy, is not a traditional hierarchical organisation where the decisions of those at the top of the organisation are simply implemented by those below. The hierarchy in the Church of England have little direct control over priests and parishes because incumbents have held the freehold of their parishes and each parish is essentially its own autonomous charity. This situation is only minimally changed for priests by common tenure and means that priests and parishes can effectively ignore the hierarchy of the Church should they wish to do so with, in comparison to most other organisations, minimal comeback. This independence and autonomy is, in my opinion, highly valued by many of us (priests and parishes) and we then fervently resist changes which would encroach on or limit this independence and autonomy.

It can then be, as part of seeking to preserve this independence and autonomy, that some come to oppose so-called bureaucratic or managerial methods which have the effect both of increasing accountability and decreasing scope for individualism. Managerial methods are decried as adopting the methods of the ‘world’ which don’t apply to the Church but, it seems to me, that our valuing of independence and autonomy without accountability is as much an adoption of ‘worldly’ values because it is an expression of the individualism which characterises modernism and consumerism instead of the communitarianism which should characterise the Christian faith.

While accountability features among the strategic priorities and within Transforming Leadership, I am not confident that this tendency towards individualism and autonomy fostered by the existing structures of the Church is adequately identified or addressed. While this is clearly a provocative contribution to the continuing and widespread discussion that Transforming Presence initiates, and a contribution with which many of my colleagues may disagree, I hope that we can have an honest and open discussion of strategic priorities, approaches and structures and that these views can be heard and understood within that process. 


For other views, see Banksy here and the twitter stream for the event.

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David Bowie - Heroes.

3 comments:

Fr Paul Trathen, Vicar said...

I think that the point about accountability is well made. I, too, think of the relative autonomy of parishes in the C of E as both a precious gift and also, to some managerial ways of thinking, its great disgrace.
However, the real mistake here is in side-swerving the crucial Christian vision and demand of MUTUAL acountability. This is the vision of the early pastoral and teaching epistles of the New Testament and is the truly radical, transformative vision which is both virtuous of itself and also instuctive and performative of the other ambitions of efective evangelism and living 'Christianly'. (Incidentally, on the last point, there are many writers who have written well using this term! Walsh and Middleton spring to mind, as do a number of Anabaptist/Mennonite theologians and ethicists.)
I think I may take some time to blog my thoughts about MUTUAL ACCOUNTABILITY as a charism of Church, over on my own, underused site...

Fr Paul Trathen, Vicar said...

BTW, starter for ten....
My contention is that mutual accountability, like other features of church life, is to operate at the level of the church family, the basic pastoral unit.
Part of the confusion in the 'Transforming Presence' document is that it moots a valid Christian vision for transformation and presence, but (wrongly) supposes that a large and unwieldy institution such as a Diocese can 'deliver' it...

Jonathan Evens said...

I'm not sure that the 'Transforming Presence' document does suppose that the Diocese can deliver the vision for transformation and presence. The talk in the document and 'Transforming Leadership' seems to be predominantly in terms of a structure to support parishes in their ministry of transformation and presence.

However, in order to do that effectively, in an organisation where delivery happens through lots of autonomous local teams, the support and supervision structures need to be very close to the point of delivery. Otherwise, the kind of gap that we hear commonly lamented in the Church of England between parish and Diocese develops.

'Transforming Leadership' aims to address this issue by creating new Archdeaconaries and thereby bringing support and supervision structures closer to parishes. Personally, I think that does not bring the structures sufficiently close and think that a better solution would be for Area Deans to be the point at which the Diocese and deaneries connect for support and supervision of priests and parishes. Additionally I think that training/lifelong learning structures also need to be brought much closer to parishes and have set out my views on that at http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2011/03/experiential-learning-and-lay-training.html.

My point in my post, though, is that there is huge resistance in practice to support and supervision structures being brought closer to priests and parishes. So, while priests and parishes regularly complain about the inadequacies of the Diocese, in practice they don't want support and supervision structures brought closer to parishes because, in my view, they value their independence and autonomy too highly and are, as a result, individualistic in their approach to ministry.

This, it seems to me, is the elephant in the room. Something that everyone knows but never acknowledges.

All this fits well with what you are saying about mutual accountability and I'll be very interested to see how you set out your thinking on that topic.