Demand the Impossible

When I started out in the diocese, each Archdeacon had a secretary. Then they had to share one; now they have none, and must open all their letters themselves. I wasn’t aware of this until Deanery Chapter yesterday, not being in the habit of scanning the staff lists on the diocesan website, or having any contacts in Church House who might tell me what’s happening there. Sandra the church office manager tells me people doing their own admin is pretty standard practice in business now, but I wouldn’t like to be either archdeacon, knowing how hard it is to administer myself. I'm waiting for some kind of response to an important letter I sent our poor archdeacon this week and wondering what might have happened to it, absent someone whose job is not to lose it.

Chapter was full, if not exactly of complaints, of concerns that the diocese no longer really knows what’s going on or what to do. At the start of the pandemic we had regular updates on how the diocesan authorities and the Church in general were responding, and in fact there was the slight impression that dozens of bishops suddenly stuck in their palaces with time on their hands were if anything doing a bit too much thinking and sharing of those thoughts: now, the tap has been turned off. My colleagues are looking for a steer, for something more than the self-defeating ‘management of decline’ models that they see as coming out from the Church as a whole, cutting parish clergy positions and closing churches. Where are we supposed to be going? Can’t we respond in some more positive way to the challenges we face than cuts?

I know what they mean, but for once I have a bit of sympathy with the bishops. What seems to me to be the outrageous proliferation of managerial roles in many dioceses (though not in ours), accompanied with slashing numbers of parish clergy, has all too painfully often been couched in hifalutin religious language that dresses up cuts due to lack of money as spiritual renewal; it might turn out to be that, long hence, but it’s hard to see at the moment. We could do with a little less of that. When the pandemic hit, the original narrative from the Church was that this was a great opportunity to ‘rethink Church’, and most of us rightly resented the apparent blindness to the fact that things were really hard and, not least, lots of people were dying. Stung by this, at least locally, the emphasis heaved round to acknowledging stress and strain and mourning the losses we’ve undergone, to the extent that we hardly got anything else from Church House. When I was a child I learned not to mention that I enjoyed certain brands of sweet, because I knew that if I did I’d get nothing other than those; and the same sort of thing seemed to be happening.

Managerialist blather and top-down schemes are not what we want; but neither is a Church that has nothing to say about where we might be going. We want leadership, but also autonomy. We want realism, but also positivity. But not too much positivity. We want an awful lot. I’m not sure I could supply the required mix if I had a pointy hat.