May we have our Church back please?

The wartime group that provided entertainment for our troops was called ENSA and some joked that the initials stood for “Every night something awful.” When I look at Archbishop Justin Welby’s Renewal and Reform project, I think EDSW — “Every day something worse.” And I’m not the only one. Martyn Percy, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford has been critical of Justin Welby’s leadership, in particular his managerial style. Professor Percy describes Welby’s plans to send senior clergy on leadership courses as showing a poor judgment of the church’s priorities and lacking in theological understanding. He adds that Welby’s targets for efficiency and growth are not reflective of the Christian mission, given that Jesus “didn’t spend a lot of time going on about success.”

Percy fears that the church is being “driven by mission-minded middle managers” who only alienate. Renewal and Reform seems to be a hybrid fusion of excitable jiving for Jesus enthusiasts and devotees of the secular cult of managerial techniques, jargon and gimmicks. Percy, in the afterword to his latest book, describes current church strategy as “Centralised management, organisational apparatus and the kind of creeping concerns that might consume an emerging suburban sectarianism, instead of a national church.”