by Ian Paul, Premier Christianity
The former Archbishop of Canterbury is no fan of managerialism, but it can be necessary and effective to help church leaders focus on evangelism and growth, says Rev Dr Ian Paul. When it doesn’t, it must be ruthlessly cut out – starting right at the top
In a recent interview, Lord Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, made a rather startling remark about Church bureaucracy. He was in a conversation with UnHerd about evil and the demonic in culture – particularly “the erosion of standards of truthfulness in public life and the normalisation of violence in word and deed”. And he was also worried about a Church “too preoccupied with strategy — with schemes for solving problems — and not preoccupied enough with its own integrity as a community of witness and prayer.”
The interviewer, Freddie Sayers, asked whether Williams considered this, too, to be demonic. “In a word, yes”, he replied, explaining that the diabolical is a “pull to the destructive and towards a kind of idolatry of the self and the corporate self and its wellbeing and security and control.”
I know very well that Williams intensely dislikes bureaucracy and ‘managerialism’; I learned it from him in personal conversation, but also from observation when I joined the Archbishops’ Council just over ten years ago. The Council then appeared to have inherited a fairly chaotic set-up, and despite significant improvements, I still have major questions about its effectiveness.
A quartet of bureaucracy
To properly make sense of Williams’ comment however, we first need to recognise that there are four kinds of bureaucracy: the necessary, the effective, the needless and the damaging.
Some bureaucracy is necessary. The Church of England is not a gathered community of the committed; it is the steward of 16,000 parishes, thousands of listed buildings, hundreds of schools, and a legal and financial architecture of extraordinary complexity. Someone has to manage the pension fund. Someone has to sign off on the faculty application for the leaking roof. That is not to say this is all done well at the moment; those administering the bureaucracy often need to be better connected with those affected by it. And there is real scope for simplifying it.