‘… and safe in such confiding, for nothing changes here.’
Hymn — Anna Laetitia Waring (1823-1910)
For those unfamiliar with the Church of England, the resignation of Justin Welby as Archbishop of Canterbury must have come as quite a shock; particularly when one considers the words of Jesus in the context of safeguarding abuse, ‘Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come. It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble. So watch yourselves’.
Safeguarding is taken very seriously throughout the Church, and I suspect that the real reason for this failure to act was not so much the desire to protect someone whose behaviour was evil as the chronically damaging cult of inaction in the Church.
Priority management is a key part of business life, not only for individuals but also in the way priorities are communicated and maintained. We all know that priorities change with time: they rise in importance as an event approaches, then drift away as they become obscured by other pressing needs. Anyone managing a business is keenly aware of the need to keep on top of priority assessment.
As we all realise, things change very fast these days: and that's a particular problem for long-term organisations such as the Church of England, which has almost made a virtue of its resistance to change over the centuries — as our opening quote from a 19th century hymn suggests. So I suspect that the critical information about John Smyth and other similar situations, notwithstanding their paramount need for priority action, just got smothered by other stuff.
However, the reverberations over Justin Welby's resignation and other situations where action on safeguarding have been overlooked is devastating news for the Church of England, accelerating a situation in which congregations have been falling back for decades: in the case of young people's attendance, this is particularly acute since the pandemic. The time for treating inaction as a virtue has to stop — it is fast becoming a serious handicap for the Christian faith rather than some kind of blessing.
It's not only an issue for Christian mission: it's also undermining the financial integrity of the Church’s situation. There are 41 English dioceses throughout England, and each regards itself as an organisational fiefdom. Beyond the payment of clergy stipends and pensions, there are relatively few administrative services which are provided centrally or even regionally, and this means there is a massive duplication of effort and organisational inconsistency throughout the Church.
No business would tolerate this degree of inefficiency. Shortly after I joined the Church Commissioners as a General Synod-elected board member, I submitted my 2002 proposal, ‘One Body, Many Parts’, to the House of Bishops. Some kindly remarks were made at the time, but the proposal was shelved, just as are so many other proposals for change.
Fast forward twenty-two years and the problem of organisational duplication and inconsistency is becoming acute. The cost of inefficient organisation is not reducing, but the number of stipendiary clergy in parish ministry is, at a significant rate. So, when this is applied to parish share calculations, it results in the alarming fact that ‘administrative and support costs per minister’ are now rising at a rate of nearly 12% compared to the national minimum stipend increase of 3% — even in a relatively wealthy diocese such as Oxford.
The need for rationalisation is therefore acute; continued inaction may well result in large-scale closure of smaller churches throughout England if action is not taken swiftly.
Of course, the Church is not alone in suffering the ravages of inaction in our fast-changing world. Photographers may recall Kodak, the company which failed to react to the onset of digital photography and collapsed as a result. In the United Kingdom, high street shoppers may recall Woolworths and so many other retail chains whose inaction in the face of online shopping resulted in their closure.
Inaction can no longer be treated as a virtue in any walk of life, and it's time to consider carefully the underlying message of the old French saying, ‘Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’.
In the Church’s situation the only thing which should be treated as ‘plus la même chose’ is the Christian faith itself, and the two great commandments which underpin it. As we have commented in the past, the second of these, ‘To love your neighbour as yourself’, is the challenge which enables people to demonstrate their commitment to the first, ‘To love God’.
Christians are, in fact, very active in the field of community action which is inspired by this second great commandment; they tend to just get on with it without displaying their work as a promotional virtue. Unfortunately, the Church more often tends to prefer its traditional settings and imagery rather than its members’ actions in helping the homeless and hungry. If its huge involvement in community action was more evident, as another report, ‘Resourcing Christian Community Action’, with which I was involved in 2012 proposed, people might understand the real motivation for Christianity rather better.
The reality of this challenge was made crystal clear in the BBC Radio 4 Sunday service from New York, which started with this extraordinary sonnet on ‘Christ the King’ by Malcolm Guite. It’s inspired by an extract from St. Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 25, verses 31-46, which shows how the second and first great commandments are linked:
‘Our King is calling from the hungry furrows whilst we are cruising through the aisles of plenty,
Our hoardings screen us from the man of sorrows, our soundtracks drown his murmur: ‘I am thirsty’.
He stands in line to sign in as a stranger and seek a welcome from the world he made,
We see him only as a threat, a danger; he asks for clothes, we strip-search him instead.
And if he should fall sick then we take care that he does not infect our private health;
We lock him in the prisons of our fear lest he unlock the prison of our wealth.
But still on Sunday we shall stand and sing the praises of our hidden Lord and King.’
If the Church of England is to shake off its current woes, it needs to say farewell to inaction and prioritise these core principles of the Christian faith that really matter, and to reflect on the Christian qualities called for by the Bishop of Oxford in his recent address to the Oxford diocesan synod. In all these things it is important to remember that the Church is not itself the faith — it is the vehicle whose duty is to carry the faith forward from generation to generation. Sometimes it does that task well — at other times, very badly. It’s time for such a reset now.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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