Transforming the Workplace

This evening I ran a session on 'Transforming the Workplace', as part of the Continuing Ministerial Development programme in the Diocese of Chelmsford, with a very engaged and responsive group of curates.

Last week I listened to the second in this year's series of Keene Lectures at Chelmsford Cathedral where Revd. Will Morris outlined his understanding of the issues which led to the credit crunch and argued for a positive engagement by the Church with the world of work together with a postive theology of work to underpin that engagement. My 'Transforming the Workplace' session, which I had previously delivered for St Mellitus College students and which adapts materials from the Christians in the Workplace resource pack, seeks to outline such a theology of work.

I used as a framework N.T. Wright's idea of salvation history as a five act play suggesting that in 'Act 1: Creation' work is seen as a collaborative partnership developing the possibilities inherent in God's creation. 'Act 2: The Fall' is then our choice to undertake the task of developing the created order independently of God and, in aiming to exploit creation for human ends, to work against the best interests and inherent possibilities of creation. As a result, work is experienced as toil and hardship. The end of the play ('Act 5') sees our experience of work being restored to its original form (Isaiah 65.21-23).

At the heart of my suggested theology of work is a quote from Richard Baukham regarding our present experience of “painful contradiction between the promise and present reality.” Bauckham writes: “The contradiction arises from a hope for the world, for the whole of this worldly reality, which it exposes in all its god-forsakenness. The Christian’s suffering is thus a loving solidarity with the whole of the suffering creation … and a hopeful solidarity in expectation of the transformation of all creation … Love and hope for the world involve the Christian in a movement towards world-transformation which has two moments: critical opposition and creative expectation … In the first moment, hope liberates the Christian from all accommodation to the status quo and sets him critically against it … In the second moment, it gives rise to attempts to change the world in the direction of its promised transformation, imaginatively grasping and realising the objective possibilities in the present which conform most closely to the coming Kingdom.”

As an example of work-related liberation from the status quo I used Mark Greene's summary of Biblical teaching on work. Greene says that work is “intended as a source of satisfaction and pleasure”; “an intrinsic part of our walk with God”; limited by our need for rest and by our ultimate value being found elsewhere; “done for God” as worship and therefore needing to be done well; “any activity that contributes to the provision of human needs – cooking, washing, food shopping, car maintenance – as well as those activities that generate money directly”; and a means of provision (for families and for those who don’t have), mutual service, and personal development. I argued that seeking to live these approaches to work with integrity involves a liberation from the status quo of ways in which work is viewed and approached within our culture.

For Bauckham that is only one part of a fuller response to living between the promise and the present reality. I illustrated the second aspect of being critically set against the status quo by using the example of Distributism, which aims to be "a third-way economic philosophy that sits between socialism and capitalism. According to distributism, the ownership of the means of production should be spread as widely as possible among the general populace, rather than being centralized under the control of the state or a few large businesses or wealthy private individuals.

Distributism was developed by Hilaire Belloc from Roman Catholic social encyclicals and has since been a thread knitting together the journalistic pronouncements of G. K. Chesterton with the alternative arts and crafts communities formed by Eric Gill and Father Vincent McNabb, the ‘small is beautiful’ economics of E. F. Schumacher, and the work structuring methodology devised by Schumacher’s son, Christian. Gill, for example, wrote that the “factory system is unchristian primarily because it deprives workmen of responsibility for their work.”

Finally, there is creative expectation; "attempts to change the world in the direction of its promised transformation, imaginatively grasping and realising the objective possibilities in the present which conform most closely to the coming Kingdom.” This I illustrated with the example of Christian Schumacher who, in his work as a company consultant, restructures work so that each workgroup member can personally plan, do and evaluate at least one transformation in the work process. Schumacher “asks that … each person should be willing to give up the ‘raw material’ of his or her own ideas in order that it can be subsumed or absorbed into the pool of other ideas being contributed by other team members, so that a new and better ‘product’ of the team’s combined endeavours can be created”. This experience “of unity in a warm, effective and strongly bound cohesive team operating within divinely compatible structures” has moved participants “to deepen their own inner lives” and has drawn them closer to God.

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The Jam - Smithers-Jones.

Faith-based models of leadership (6)

‘Whole’ work

Christian Schumacher argues in his book God in Work that all work processes involve cycles of ‘death and rebirth’. He calls these basic transformations which “occur in all authentic work processes whether in manufacturing, health, education or any other sector of society.”

Basic transformations in a work environment are easy to recognize because they:

• are the activities involving step-function or quantum-jump changes to the state of the product;
• are often irreversible; what is done cannot easily be undone;
• can be the most complex and difficult stages to control in a work process; and
• involve major physical, chemical, electrical, informational or other changes to the internal constitution or function of the product.

They represent the reason why other activities take place, embodying the purpose of all work processes.

Drawing on his Christian understandings of God as Trinity and of the Church as the body of Christ, Schumacher has identified seven principles for the structuring of work which are based around basic transformations and which lead to the creation of ‘whole’ work:

1. Teams and their leaders must be able to plan and organise as much of their own work as possible. This reflects the work of God the Father in originating human work.
2. Work must be organised around basic transformations to form ‘whole’ tasks. This reflects the work of God the Son in death and rebirth;
3. Teams should be able evaluate their own performance against agreed performance measures. This reflects the work of God the Spirit in bringing work to its fitting end.
4. Team working should be encouraged in order to reflect the nature of the Church.
5. Each team member should be able to plan, do and evaluate at least one transformation in their team’s processes. This reflects the nature of the Church as a body.
6. Each team should have a designated leader in order to reflect Christ’s leadership of the Church.
7. Each team should contain between four and twenty people in order that everyone can communicate fully with each other.

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Charlie Peacock - In the Light.

MiLE Gospel Reflection - Mark 16. 1-8

This is my Easter Sunday Gospel Reflection for the MiLE website:

Resurrection involves transformation. The good news of Easter Day is that Jesus is alive with a transformed body. That transformation means that Jesus’ project to transform the world, the kingdom of God, has been launched and will happen. Accordingly, his disciples are transformed from fearful beings to those who will go to the whole world with this transformative good news.

Work is also about transformation. Christian Schumacher has argued that all work involves a death and resurrection transformation. This is most obvious in physical processes such as the iron and steel industry where rock deposits are transformed into steel ingots but it is also true of services such as health or education where the transformations made involve wellness and wisdom. The key is to identify the central transformation and structure the work around that change.

Truly transformative work not only mirrors Christ’s death and resurrection but becomes part of the new creation that Christ’s resurrection begins.

Prayer: May your resurrection transform not only our lives but also our ways of working that we might share with you in seeing a transformed world – the kingdom of God – come. Amen.

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Creed - My Sacrifice.

A crisis of faith & life (3)

It is here that the theologians of the exile can help us in hearing and responding to the call of God:

• First, because they have been there before us - they were the divorcees of God – we can understand from them something of why we feel as we do.
• Second, because their pattern of reflection and re-interpretation based on the tradition gives a biblical means of reviving our roots and re-claiming our disputed lineage. We need to dream up what Church is and can be for future generations all over again. As a start, we could re-examine our biblical and church heritage by retelling the stories to ourselves and to others. This is where developments in narrative theology and storytelling may be of some use to us in finding a way forward. Graham Cray has argued that we are a ‘hinge generation’ making the transition between a Church that was addressing modernity and one that will in future address post-modernity and beyond. Therefore, we should not expect to have all the answers to hand but instead should engage in a re-examination of our roots in order to imagine our future on a scale that is at least equal to that of the theologians of the exile.
• Third, our interim strategy should involve the threefold approach of assimilation, voicing hurt and articulating hope:
  
  · Assimilation: as we operate within a culture which is at best ambiguous towards Christianity, the Church needs to develop the Joseph’s, Daniel’s, Nehemiah’s and Esther’s for our generation. These will be people able to be hidden advocates for our faith and able too from within to show up the inadequacies of the dominant culture and point that culture towards Christ. The examples of The Relationship Foundation and Work Structuring Ltd give us two models from the worlds of public policy and work that provide hints about the way to go;
  
  · Voicing hurt: following Jesus – who has removed all the barriers to intimacy - we should expect to move corporately into the intimate relationship with God that these theologians experienced individually, thinking and acting as God does. Our experience as the body of Christ should be that we think with the mind of Christ. Jesus’ thought and action was modelled on the suffering servant and our aim should be to live as Jesus’ body in and through that same model.
  
  · Articulating hope: we need to protest the present because it hurts and is less desirable and faithful than what is promised in the theological tradition. Hope springs from hurt and therefore the future will only be re-imagined if we do not feel satisfied with the present. We need to make common cause with those most hurt by the dominant culture because God hears and wants to respond to their cries through us. They are also in the places where the inadequacies of the dominant culture are most apparent. Common cause can also be made with those identifying judgement on the dominant culture. Judgement on consumer capitalism is most likely to come through the changes that it has and is making to the eco-system. We need to further develop our theology of green issues speaking and acting publicly and symbolically in this arena.

In the West we exist within a time of crisis. We are the generation for whom the city has fallen - the ‘hinge generation’ existing between paradigms. Our experience may be of exile, loss, and bereavement, the ending of our known world. This experience can be a means of identification with Jesus in suffering, a means of entering in to the paradigm of the suffering servant – a paradigm that is more authentically Christian than that of the dominant culture – and a means of entering into a mature, intimate relationship with our God. Our God is a God of new beginnings, of fresh starts. He is the resurrection God and, therefore, the one who gives hope that we can rise from the ruins:

“There ain’t nobody asks to be born There ain’t nobody wishes to die Everybody whiles away the interim time Sworn to rise from the ruins by and by

The engines are droning with progress The pistons are pounding out time And it’s you and me caught in this juggernaut jaunt Left to rise from the ruins down the line

We will roll like an old Chevrolet The road to ruin is something to see Hang on to the wheel For the highway to hell needs chauffeurs For the powers that be

Go and tell all your friends and relations Go and say what ain’t easy to say Go and give them some hope That we might rock this boat And rise from the ruins one day

Ever try to carry water in a basket Ever try to carry fire in your hand Ever try to take on the weight of the everyday freight Til’ you find that you’re too weak to stand

Why so pale and wan, fond lover Why so downcast and desperately sad We can walk, we can talk We ain’t yet pillars of salt We will rise from the ruins while we can."

(Mark Heard - Rise from the Ruins)

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The Mark Heard Tribute Project - We Know Too Much.

There were giants in those days (4)

Finally, their emphasis on relationality. They chose to explore aspects of coinherence and relationality at a time when progress was achieved through specialisation and when World Wars were undermining belief in human brotherhood. Relationality, however, was fundamental to their vision enabling them to explore the links between past, present and future within works that aimed at being holistic and reconciliatory.

Eliot’s Four Quartets ends with our arrival at the place of our beginning but, for the first time, with knowledge of the place itself. This knowledge is of unity:

“A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”

This knowledge is also that of the eldila in Lewis’ Perelandra:

“In the plan of the Great Dance plans without number interlock, and each movement becomes in its season the breaking into flower of the whole design to which all else had been directed. Thus each is equally at the centre and none are there by being equals, some by giving place and some by receiving it, the small things by their smallness and the great by their greatness, and all the patterns linked and looped together by the unions of a kneeling with a sceptred love. Blessed be He!”

In this aspect of their thought, these artists were ahead of their time. Now, with the growth of the global village, globalisation, the international community and the world-wide web, inter-connectivity is a ‘live’ issue. Moynagh describes globalisation as involving “the interlocking of nations so that they begin to form a single unit” and argues that as “[p]eople across the globe are becoming connected in new ways … this will transform our lives … [providing] fresh opportunities to be in touch with others”. “New networks will give rise to a new society”. This optimism is echoed by Susan Greenfield. She predicts that as we communicate and learn through new technologies, “we won’t see ourselves as individuals any more”. Instead, “[w]e will be a living web”, “more networked and connected, less separate”. This change will come because “when people learn predominantly in visual form from screens, they won’t think in linear ways, but in “hypertext”, free-associating between ideas in the same way information is accessed on the web".

Jones provides a theological underpinning for a ‘hypertext’ approach to knowledge. Jones believes that objects, images and words accrue meanings over the years that are more than the object as object or image as image. This is the idea of the signifier and the signified that is found in semiotics. All things, therefore, including human beings and other living creatures are signs re-presenting something else in another form. Recessive signs which re-present this multiple signification are what Jones aims to create in works such as The Anathemata and Aphrodite in Aulis. Maritain suggests that it is multiple signification that creates joy or delight in a work of art:

“the more there is of knowledge, or of things presented to the understanding, the vaster will be the possibility of joy; this is why Art, in so far as ordered to Beauty, does not, at least when its object permits, stop at forms or at colours, nor at sounds, nor at words taken in themselves and as things, but it takes them also as making known other things than themselves, that is to say as signs. And the thing signified may itself be a sign in turn, and the more the work of art is laden with significance … the vaster and the richer and the higher will be the possibility of joy and beauty”.

For Jones such signification is the essence of a Christianity, which has, at its heart, the re-presenting of Christ under the form of bread and wine. When the sign is the thing signified what you have is incarnation, the union of the natural and the supernatural.

This same correspondence is also found in the work of Williams. He argues that the supernatural and, ultimately, God himself, is known “through images within the natural”. At its best this is the Beatrician moment, when “one can know himself to be … in Love; one can have a sense of living within the beloved”, of imaging and participating in the “supernatural fact of coinherence”. “All things,” Williams suggests, “are held together by correspondence, image with image, movement with movement. Without that there could be no relation and therefore no truth. It’s our business – especially yours and mine – to take up the power of relation”.

Once we have seen that we live from others, then Williams suggests that we are able to live for others through mutuality, reciprocity and exchange. “At the root of the physical nature of man,” he wrote, “lie exchange of liking, substitution, inherence. The nature of man which is so expressed in the physical world is expressed after the same manner, only more fully, in the mental and spiritual”.

Again, the Incarnation is key. Williams says that Jesus, “preferred to shape himself within the womb, to become hereditary, to owe to humanity the flesh he divinitized by the same principle – ‘not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God.’ By an act of substitution he reconciled the natural world with the world of the kingdom of heaven, sensuality with substance. He restored substitution and co- inherence everywhere; up and down the ladder of that great substitution all our lesser substitutions run; within that sublime co-inherence all our lesser co-inherences inhere”.

For Williams, exchange has economic and political implications as well as ecclesiastical and personal. Similarly, Sayers argues that “… the Church, as a Christian society, is concerned … to sanctify humanity … the whole of humanity”. “She must,” Sayers argues, “include within her sacraments all arts, all letters, all labour and all learning … she stands committed to the assertion that all human activity, whether of spirit, mind or body, is potentially good – not negatively, by repression, but positively, and as an act of worship. Further, she must include a proper reverence for the earth and for all material things; because these also are the body of the living God”.

This is so Sayers believes because “the Trinitarian structure which can be shown to exist in the mind of man and in all his works is, in fact, the integral structure of the universe, and corresponds, not by pictorial imagery but by a necessary uniformity of substance, with the nature of God, in Whom all that is exists”. Therefore, all human making follows this Trinitarian, coinherent, inter-connected pattern:

“First: there is the Creative Idea; passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning; and this is the image of the Father.

Second: there is the Creative Energy, begotten of that Idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter; and this is the image of the Word.

Third: there is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul; and this is the image of the indwelling Spirit.

And these three are one, each equally in itself the whole work, whereof none can exist without other; and this is the image of the Trinity.”

Through recessive signification, the Way of Affirmation, the Beatrician moment and the Trinitarian patterning of making, a theological basis for inter-connextivity and the networked society can be formed which holds the potential for the Church to “join up the fragments of society” in the way that Sayers and these other artists envisaged.

In our day, people like Moynagh through The Tomorrow Project, Michael Schluter of The Relationships Foundation, and Christian Schumacher of Work Structuring Ltd. are developing policy and practice on the basis of these ideas while the likes of Walter Brueggemann and Mark Oakley in speaking respectively of funding the counter-imagination and the collage of God are taking our theological understanding of relationality further. While seeking to understand and build on the work of such thinkers and practitioners we should not neglect or under-estimate the extent to which the artists considered in this series can fund the counter-imagination of the Church as it builds a collage of God for the 21st century.

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Robert Randolph & The Family Band- Deliver Me.