In a Guardian article published on Good Friday, Andrew Brown quoted Justin Welby, Bishop of Durham as saying, "The longer I go on with this, the more I realise that the Church of England is not an organisation in any recognisable sense." In the article, Welby is quoted as expanding on this statement as follows:
"Any sort of concept of top-down direction is much more complicated than it looks. Part of it is illusion: because bishops are dressed up in funny clothes, with funny hats and special sticks it's assumed that if they say to a bunch of parish clergy 'do something', they will do it. But that's not how it works and never has been. Each part of the church has its own competence."
Welby is, as Brown notes, a bishop who "worked for 12 years in the oil industry before becoming a priest, so he knows something about the outside world." What he seems to be saying is that the structure of the Church of England doesn't look or function anything like the organisations he knew before ordination.
To the extent that I understand its structures it seems to me that the Church of England combines three different structures - a network of autonomous charities (parishes) covering the entire country; a regional framework (dioceses) which primarily supports the parishes; and a central structure delivering services to both dioceses and parishes while also undertaking national initiatives for the Church as a whole.
Within these three different structures there is rarely any direct line managerial responsibility for those whose ministries are enabled by some combination of these three structures. For clergy, this has presumably stemmed from our legal status as ministers of God rather than employees of a human institution. Clergy are centrally selected and trained but are appointed by a combination of external patrons, Diocese, and parish. We require a licence from the Diocese to minister but, once this has been granted, have considerable security and autonomy in parish ministry combined with minimal supervision (this situation is changing to a limited extent as a result of common tenure). Clergy generally chair the PCC (or varient) but it is the PCC as a whole which has overall responsibility for the charity that is the parish. As a result, the parish is essentially independent of the diocese and national church, although reliant on both for ordained ministers. The overlaps and complexities of these relationships extend throughout the three different structures and mean that, as Welby notes, the usual line management arrangements do not operate in anything like the same way in the Church of England as they do in other organisations.
All this has massive implications for the future of the Church of England because it means that there is no quick or simple mechanism for making the changes which are needed to respond to the changed mission context in which we minister. For example, Transforming Presence, the strategic document issued recently by Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Chelmsford, notes that, while deaneries have been asked to think about cutting stipendiary posts because of the ticking time bomb of clergy retirements, many deaneries have simply planned ahead on the basis of who is going to retire next. What the document doesn't acknowledge however is that, because of the complexities noted above, the Church of England has no mechanisms for doing anything else.
None of this will change quickly so, as well as thinking about possible future structural changes, we need to make the best of the structures we have and recognise that in some respects what have is a structure which is focussed on the local parish but doesn't make that structure work very effectively (partly because of the inbuilt complexities).
In his article, Andrew Brown also quoted Alan Wilson, the Bishop of Buckingham, as saying, "The church of the future may be less a civil service or conventional business, and more a movement like Alcoholics Anonymous, the ultimate locally delivered, life-changing non-profit organisation. The job of the hierarchy will be to enable this, not to represent it or control it."
But as we have said the Church of England is not structured like the civil service or conventional business and we are actually structured for local delivery. The problem is the difficulty of ensuring that the three different structures work together cohesively and changing attitudes of independence and autonomy within each of the structures which do not prioritise cohesion and collaborative working.
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Switchfoot - Dare You To Move.
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