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.