Will the Church follow the Post Office?
by Giles Fraser, UnHerd:
Managerialism is killing communities.
Some years ago, Archbishop Justin Welby’s predecessor, Rowan Williams, was asked to name his favourite sound on Radio 4’s Today programme. He recorded the noise of gentle chatter in his local post office, that low hum of community interaction in which people were asking after each other, and passing the time of day as they picked up their pensions or posted a letter. This is a place in which the Church has long been naturally at home.
The postmaster, like the vicar and the publican, has historically created a kind of tapestry out of individual, sometimes rather lonely, human lives. Through the wonderful alchemy of community, it is capable of transforming them into something immeasurably more worthwhile. But in the first half of last year, pubs were closing at a rate of two a day. Churches are being shut down by the very people who are supposed to be keeping them open. In 2000, nearly a million people went to a Church of England service on a Sunday; by 2022, that figure fell to 549,000. And, as all of us have learned this January if we didn’t know already, for the past two decades the Post Office has been driving its own employees into the ground.
The Church has become intertwined in this scandal in more than symbolic ways however, through the figure of Rev. Paula Vennells, first ordained as a deacon in 2005 and CEO of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019. She is now personally and nominally tied to one of our century’s great miscarriages of justice. And I imagine the Archbishop of Canterbury now rather regrets the foreword to his book Reimagining Britain: Foundations for Hope in which he credits Vennells with having “shaped my thinking over the years”. But this wasn’t just a rhetorical tribute: Vennells’s thinking has left its mark on more than one national institution. Across her careers, she has championed and centralised precisely the kind of centralising managerialism that leaves the little people forgotten. It is exactly this approach that Welby has galvanised as a battering ram against the local parish church throughout his tenure at Canterbury.
Read also: ‘Mr Bates vs the Post Office’ contains hard lessons for the Church by Tony Wilson, Premier
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