An Offer

This sickening little graphic is exactly why I've never thought of myself as a 'leader' and don't trust those who do. I regularly get bumf through the post from various Christian organisations which want to tell me how to be a leader, grow leaders, learn about leadership, and so on. Anyone who thinks of themselves as a leader should on no account actually be allowed to lead anyone else, in a properly ordered world. 

So it was with ambiguous feelings that I had an email the other day from the diocesan training department 'offering me the chance' to attend a leadership course next year, run by Keith Lambdin, the principal of Salisbury Theological College, and a couple of local clergy. 'The bishop is fully in support of this initiative', said the note, 'and of your participation in particular'. Which makes me wonder whether this is the kind of 'invitation' one can refuse, or not. The course will be lengthy - about a fortnight spread over the year, including two residential sessions of a couple of days each; expensive (costing about £1000 in all, of which the diocese will stump up half, with the residue coming from my annual training allowance and, in theory, the parish); and of as-yet unclear content. My long experience is that professional training courses both within the Church and outside it never deliver what they promise, and the lessons you learn are almost never those which the course intends to teach you. What they invariably do deliver is traumatic episodes of role-playing and opportunities for public humiliation. I have to have a lot of persuading that this will do me or anyone else any good.

I am not averse to the idea of training. A former parish priest who now works as a management consultant and treats Lamford as his parish church has written a book on the management of change within the Church which everyone regards very highly: were the diocese to invite him to run a course which actually looked at what change might really mean or how the Church might be better organised to facilitate it, now, that would be interesting. Unfortunately, as I've said before, while the Church pays lip-service to the concept of 'change', it appears to have no idea what such change might actually look like. 

However this gentleman says good things about Fr Keith Lambdin, and our curate has lent me his book which isn't bad, rather firmly and clearly written and with a minimum of nonsense (at least a couple of chapters in). He suggests most clergy - almost willy-nilly - fall into the leadership styles he calls the Monarch or the Warrior, which are in fact the least helpful in the context of the modern Church, and posits a set of different ways of thinking about what you do as a minister (I like putting it that way, rather than 'leadership styles') which are a bit more healthy. I can't see 'the Coward' or 'the Evader' as an option, unfortunately, but I'm hoping reading the book will justify me in not doing the course.