I have started to reflect on the way the Church is managed and organised today. The Church, both locally and nationally, has a continuum of management styles like any other organisation. Speaking very generally there will be some churches and organisations that operate in an authoritarian manner while others foster a high degree of collaboration among the staff. Outwardly the Church of England has the form of a highly authoritarian organisation. It uses the structure of a hierarchical pyramid, with Archbishops at the top and lay people at the base. That is, of course, not how things are supposed to work out in practice. The humblest lay person can theoretically challenge an Archbishop. There are officially systems that make this possible through synods, legal processes etc. But, as we saw in the testimony of the last blog post, the legal frameworks for obtaining justice are highly convoluted and difficult to negotiate. Most people, including those in positions of authority, are not always clear what is possible in the Church and how power is supposed to operate in practice.
One hundred and fifty years ago, Anthony Trollope was writing his novels about Barchester and at the same time casting a critical challenging eye at the management of the Church of England. I am no expert on Victorian church history, but I cannot imagine that Trollope was the only one campaigning about the enormous privileges in society that the Church of England enjoyed. In addition there were also the anomalies of unequal and unjust structures within the Church itself. Mr Quiverfull and his numerous children lived in a cold vicarage at Puddingdale on £150 p.a. while the Cathedral clergy at Barchester received twelve times the amount. We can say that Trollope was helping to make the public aware of three areas of power in the Church – social power, financial privilege for some and the power of patronage. Social power and patronage power run very close together. Preferment in the Barchester diocese was linked to having the right relatives, having been at the right Oxford college or knowing someone with links to the Prime Minister. Certainly, the clergy in Victorian times all seemed to come from the ‘right drawer’. Others from humbler backgrounds were ordained, but many of these were expected to remain curates on £40 a year for their entire ministries.
A further form of power was in evidence in the Victorian church and later – the power of education. Most clergy were highly educated by the standards of the day. Most were also conscientious about their work and took their vocations seriously. The classics were the preferred education for the elite classes who, apart from the clerical profession, went into such professions as the Army or the Civil and Colonial Services. Although that style of learning is no longer in fashion, as far as the clergy were concerned it did equip them with a real appreciation for the Bible in its original languages. Also, the clergyman resident in his vicarage exercised considerable local influence by being, usually, by far the best educated person in the neighbourhood.
These four forms of power that I have identified have to be added to a more modern form we have discussed elsewhere – charismatic power. Together these have created a church whose servants used to exercise an influence and power in society which few bothered to attempt to challenge. The situation today is that although the Church hierarchy still possesses some outward forms of power, each of the traditional manifestations have been considerably weakened. Reflecting on the massive changes in society, manifestations of clerical and episcopal power are far less obvious. Clergy no longer come from a particular class, representing wealth or social influence. Few of them depend on the patronage afforded to them by wealthy relatives for preferment. From an educational perspective, many live among populations with higher academic achievements than the clergy themselves possess. The weakening of these traditional forms of power overall represents an improvement on the situation in Trollope’s time. But the great weakness of losing all this power in the modern age is that the Church is no longer able to operate the kinds of authority suggested by the old-fashioned hierarchical structures. There is, in other words, a mismatch between the appearance of power (palaces, titles, House of Lords membership etc) and actual power, even within its own internal management. Some power of the hierarch or bishop remains, but it is qualified and checked at almost every point. As I said in a previous blog, the one remaining source of power still reliably available to a bishop, is his/her power of patronage and some influence in the way that money is allocated.
A few months back I wrote a blog about the role of bishops. This coincided with advertisements for three suffragan bishops that appeared in the Church Times at the beginning of Lent. I asked why anyone would want to be a bishop in the present day. I repeat that question in the light of what I have been describing of the way that the bishop is a person of authority, while at the same time much of the power of his/her authority has been weakened. Many constraints exist on the power of bishops. Some come from imposed legal constraints, like the Clergy Discipline Measure. Others come from the nature of the communication age we live in. As a blogger, I am aware of the power of instant access to information and the difficulty of hiding material from ordinary people. Every clergyperson has the right to see any written information held on file and that must inhibit bishops/leaders from writing anything down on paper or on a computer. In the past, the power of secrecy was rock solid and that could be seen to be an additional source of power given to those high up on the hierarchical pyramid. Committees still of course meet in private at every level of the Church. But today, even secrets have a habit of leaking out from ‘private’ discussions. This further potential tool of power through secrecy is often neutralised in real world situations. In short, the authority of the hierarchy is no longer functioning well because society and culture have combined to weaken it. They insist on the values of openness and democracy. Some new structure for the Church needs to be found which can embrace this new reality.
This final paragraph has to be a work in progress because I have not really worked out the implications of the failures and threats to the hierarchical system in the Church. While we are working out what might replace it, I want to point out the appalling stress being laid on bishops, archdeacons and others in charge. The supporting structures of real power that used to exist to reinforce their authority, are quite often no longer there or are considerably weakened. How can an Archbishop, like Justin Welby, exercise authority when he is constrained by so many things – legal structures, democratic synods and the chorus of individual bloggers who ask the questions that contemporary democracy and openness allow them. To repeat, the Church of England purports to be a hierarchy. No such structure can really flourish in the 21st century and the sooner we come to terms with this new norm, the better.
Thank you for this superb piece. Trollope would almost certainly have been aware of John Wade’s ‘Black Book’ (1828) which highlighted the dramatic differentials in clerical compensation: https://archive.org/details/blackbookorcorru02wadeuoft (it’s well worth reading) . One needs to use an historical currency converter to understand how fabulous were the incomes of the sees of Canterbury, Durham, Ely, etc., or the holders of, say, stalls at Durham (often held in commendam by certain bishops). It is, however, difficult to make credible generalisations about the Victorian Church. As with the state (and Wade has much to say about state corruption) there was a progressive move after 1830 from a system that was bent but dignified to one which was (to paraphrase Bagheot) dignified and efficient. However, the shift to efficiency compromised the ‘dignity’ of the Church as the gentry ceased to take orders (certain clerical incomes falling as a result of equalisation) and as the universities were secularised.
As I have mentioned before, dignity became untenable without income, and the consequence of the collapse of British agriculture after 1870 is that the yield from tithe rentcharge also collapsed making its continued imposition on a distressed agricultural sector increasingly untenable. This meant a shift to ‘own resources’, which were, accordingly, sold off. The Church’s capital was, therefore, progressively eliminated.
We are now at a point where, absent the Commissioners, there is relatively little money left, and that what little there is in the form of fixed assets (a rapidly decreasing number of parsonage houses held by DBFs) and the church buildings themselves. It is the massive attenuation of resources and the movement to finance the Church via voluntary contributions which has most emphatically altered the dynamic within the Church between clergy and laity, savaging the authority of the former, and making the persistence of a pseudo-feudal hierarchy inherited from yesteryear that much more problematic, and untenable.
So, I do not think we can continue to muddle through: the whole institution is in an advanced state of collapse. It has to be recognised that the Church has to be reformed, but the question is whether it is reformable, and whether the stasis between interests and parties within it (it is, after all, an increasingly ramshackle coalition) make reform impossible if all that is holding it together are the fraying ties of legal obligation and the existing moth-eaten structures.
Thank you again!
The hierarchy is of course anachronistic. As such it repeatedly shows itself incapable of making the changes it needs to survive into the 2060s.
No one in management (ie Bishops and Priests) is incentivised to make the changes necessary, and neither does the Church have a mechanism for such change. Basically, the period of expected decline exceeds by some distance the incomes and pensions of the current cohort. As has been pointed out here many times before, they’re hardly likely to vote away their own guaranteed remuneration.
It is possible that decline speed will accelerate the suggested termination date. Covid-19 hasn’t helped and other external factors could occur as well as continuing inept leadership.
The sort of change we would like to see isn’t likely to be applied voluntarily if at all. If we want to see real, thriving, healthy church life, we will need to look elsewhere.
Other half just read an on line report that Dean Martin Percy has been exonerated!
Yes, it’s great news. The various statements can be found here. http://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk
As Froghole has said on Thinking Anglicans we lack an economic history of the modern C of E I knew about the problems the Church faced after the agricultural depression but had never heard of the clergy’s response in selling assets. Where can more info on this be found? He presents an informed but unrelentingly bleak picture of the current situation. I just hope someone is listening!!
Many thanks, as ever!
Guy Shrubsole touches on the question in his recent polemic, ‘Who Owns England?’ (2019), in which he asks how a gross acreage of more than 2m acres in the late nineteenth century had shrivelled so drastically by the end of the twentieth.
In truth, the Church was not alone in shifting out of land after railroads and the Whig/Liberal shibboleth of the ‘free breakfast table’ led the importation of cheap American and Russian grain to destroy returns to British agriculture (other than dairy and soft fruits) after 1870. Oxbridge colleges and, after the renewed slump of 1919, country landowners did likewise. They generally put their sales proceeds into stocks (though if they were trustees they would often be bound by trust deeds to place the cash in consols and railway stocks – including Indian railway stocks – which produced fairly unimpressive returns). With the 1929 slump there were no good investments other than the so-called ‘new industries’ (autos, plastics, rayon, etc.) until after 1945, but most trustees were not able to make full use of these opportunities.
See also here: https://whoownsengland.org/2019/11/04/gods-acres-the-land-owned-by-the-church-commissioners/ on the Commissioners (using lots of research from the Land Registry) and here: https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/adios-landed-clergy, about glebe. This stuff is also polemical, of course, but when parched in a desert one must depend upon even discoloured water.
Frankly, I was surprised about the rapid divestment of glebe, but then on reflection was it really so odd? After all, an incumbent would have a freehold interest in his own glebe, and unless he had signed some sort of bond not to alienate that glebe, he might be able to sell it. Unfortunately, I have not yet found any useful study on legal rights and obligations relating to glebe (as there has been by John Habakkuk for the strict settlement, for example). It has to be the case that, once the real returns from tithe rentcharge and glebe collapsed, ‘furniture burning’ might become the only option for increasingly destitute clergy, especially before clergy pensions were introduced (the prospects for clergy widows being notably bleak). The Salisbury ministries (i.e., Hicks Beach, Chaplin and Long) did try to provide fiscal relief for the clergy, and this has been touched upon by Avner Offer in ‘Property and Politics, 1870-1914’ (1981) and/or ‘The First World War: an Agrarian Interpretation’ (1989), I forget which: I believe there are copies in the Templeman Library. Of course, those were the days when the clergy still constituted a significant electoral interest, especially in the countryside, but that ceased to be the case in the wake of the Liberal triumph of 1906.
We certainly need someone of the stature of Christopher Hill or Felicity Heal to write about the economic problems of the modern/contemporary Church.
A very senior university Vice Chancellor giving a lecture to a chaplains’ conference remarked that all the time you’re working in a university you think the locus of power is somewhere above you. Then when you get to the top you realise you don’t really have much power either.
It sounds quite similar to Stephen’s comments about bishops. I’m sure someone must have done some work on where the locus of power in large institutions is really located, and how it can best be exercised.
This is so very true. In that masterpiece, ‘The Education of Henry Adams’ (1918), eponymous author, the grandson and great-grandson of presidents, introduced a ‘dynamo’ theory of history, in which suggests that everyone is helpless in the face of vast impersonal historical forces over which no one has any control, even when they appear to have control (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2044).
One of the great ‘convenient frauds’ perpetrated upon the public is the notion that government ministers have any idea about what they are doing and/or that they are in control. As I see it they have certain formal powers (of which they are mostly unaware), but they are merely front-men (and women) for a bureaucracy that frequently has little notion of what it is itself doing (many senior civil servants, including permanent secretaries, being allocated to departments about which they know little or nothing, on the same revolving door basis as the ministers themselves). All these people are like corks bobbing atop a sea of events. Everyone and no one is to blame.
As with vice-chancellors and ministers, so too with bishops. The nature of the office indicates that they have significant power, but the manner in which that power can be exercised and the multitude of claims on their time (which has the effect of obviating the application of that power), means that they actually have ‘influence’ rather than actual power, and can steer things a little this way or that, but that there ability to effect radical change is limited.
The good thing for everyone else is, of course, that they have a target at which to point their barbs: blundering ministers, venal vice-chancellors or ineffectual bishops.
Of course, the Church sets itself up for this. If you look like a totalitarian construct (and individuals do have genuine power in dictatorships) you create an expectation that you will function as one. If something invidious happens then you will be blamed for being unjust and totalitarian, whereas if episcopal power is diffused through a multitude of committees, the appearance of power becomes a sham, a front. As such, the Church can sometimes find itself plunging into the gap between the appearance of power and its more timorous and diffuse reality. It is the Church’s own equivalent of the ‘credibility gap’ commonly attributed to the Johnson Administration’s bullish pronouncements on Vietnam and the more dispiriting reality reported by the press on the ground.
This is not to say that certain individuals within the Church do not have the ‘agency’ to act malevolently, but it does mean that, in many instances, the nature of the rules-based bureaucratic beast means that the Church makes errors which are the sum total of backside-covering by a number of individuals fixated by process and governed by fear of the sack.
Janet and Froghole raise interesting questions about the power source location in our institutions. It can be hard to pin down. This may be structurally designed to diffuse responsibility and by extension accountability, particularly when things go awry.
For an outsider, the way the organisation works may appear to be extremely inefficient. Why continue with it? Why not restructure? Sometimes of course there are good reasons to make changes extremely difficult to effect. For example with legacy architecture of considerable merit, it would be foolish to allow any Tom Dick or Harry to knock buildings down on a whim.
In other walks of life there are ready examples of obscure power sources. For example in professional partnerships, who really controls what goes on? In being accountable to each other, but often to no one else, the partners push relentlessly for fees and profit making decisions they would have less taste for personally. It’s often a competitive thing.
With the recent exoneration of Dean Percy, we were told millions were spent on legal fees. How could firms of lawyers who must be Christians (and if not why not?) make so much money out of such a squalid and unjustified a dispute? Surely hand on heart this should never have gone so far.
The structure of these firms and the diffusion of power enables their members to lower their ethical lowest common denominator. Ditto the Church.
Many thanks for making these excellent points, with which I agree entirely. You ask:
“How could firms of lawyers who must be Christians (and if not why not?) make so much money out of such a squalid and unjustified a dispute?”
I suppose that it must be because, even if they are Christians, they are Christians will billing targets…
I think you will find that the ‘legal fees’ might include payments to PR firms and similar. It’s been a long drawn-out saga, but at one stage I made a point of checking the credentials of all the senior personnel of one such company and did not find a single legally-qualified person.
Christ Church has engaged the services of QCs. While they practice from shared chambers, they are not legal firms in the sense that you use the term. Theirs are likely to have been the largest element of the fees incurred. The statement put out by Christ Church earlier this week specifically states that the complaints to the NST were made on the advice of a QC. Thus far, we are discussing fees incurred by Christ Church.
We know that Martyn Percy has also faced substantial fees personally.
The Church will have additionally incurred expense as a result of the latest NST investigation. We are told that an independent investigator was (rightly) engaged.
I’m afraid that there is still unfinished business for all of the parties in this sad affair.
I think I need to add this postscript, as it’s an important point which is being overlooked. The substantial legal fees were incurred in the Christ Church internal disciplinary proceedings which were initiated jointly by the Governing Body and the Christ Church Chapter. Indeed, as was pointed out at the time (possibly not here, but certainly on “Thinking Anglicans”), the Chapter had the ability under the a Christ Church Statutes to veto the whole procedure*. It’s stating the obvious that had they done so, no legal fees and other trauma would have resulted.
* Christ Church Statutes, Statute XXXIX, Part VII, Paragraphs 41 and 42
Back to the study of where is the power source in our institutions, it’s a cross-discipline field of research. Much had been written from different angles ranging from the political to the group psychological. If you ask a theologian, she’ll give you one answer, if you ask a philosopher, another. Of course the truth lies closer to the middle somewhere, and many specialists will have difficulty with this imprecision.
Those who study murmurations in bird flight will see similarities with the movement in synchrony amongst the echelons of elders in Church leadership. They move together in relative safety and towards shelter and a food source (keeping their jobs and palaces). The metaphor may irritate us, but sometimes it’s the only way to break through our preconceived ideas. No one is in charge and instinctually so.
What non-theological books and papers rarely say, is that often someone actually deliberately sins. Many in fact. Few of us are comfortable having this pointed out and you would not make much of a living as an adviser, if you repeatedly did so to your clients.
The question of who is in charge becomes focused when you are trying to change a particular decision or way of working. Certainly there is no one person in charge but there are key people who can make things happen or not happen. When I was DYO the Diocesan Secretary, Registrar & DBF chair were the trinity of power who could block my projects even if I had the bishops’ support.
I am most interested by the remarks made by Steve and Jane. I strongly suspect that Jane’s highly illuminating personal experience of one diocese is a blueprint for many others: that power is exercised by a troika of diocesan secretary (CEO or COO), registrar (general counsel) and DBF chair (CFO), thus mirroring many commercial organisations, and leaving the bishops as a chair of the board – effectively a figurehead. Perhaps there will be some bishops who will want to take up the reins as a CEO type, leaving the diocesan secretary as the COO, whilst others will be more content to waft above the nitty-gritty. It should also be noted that most diocesan secretaries will be laypeople, often the veterans of business or civil service careers, and much the same will be true of DBF chairs. If the main decisions are made by layfolk with no pastoral experience, it might help to explain some of the pastorally abysmal nature of some diocesan decision-making, though that does not, of course, absolve the bishops.
Some of the remarks made by Stephen and others put me in mind of the ‘public choice’ works of the ‘Nobel’ laureate James Buchanan and his frequent co-author Gordon Tullock (‘The Calculus of Consent’ (1962) and ‘The Politics of Bureaucracy’ (1965)). The object of politicians is to maximise electoral advantages; the object of bureaucrats is to seek advancement. Maximising votes or seeking advancement within a bureau can only be achieved by buying constituents or by pleasing superiors, which both impair public ‘welfare’. The welfare of the voters or of the people for whose benefit the bureau has been created are merely collateral: personal advancement is all. Tullock differentiated between ‘superiors’ and ‘spectators’: a bureaucrat has the option of obtaining preferment or of being marginalised. Preferment therefore involves telling superiors what they want to hear or imparting information from superiors down the chain of command in a manner which will maximise the standing of the person imparting that (increasingly distorted) information: Tullock called this ‘whistling down the wind’. Another key aspect of obtaining preferment is evading blame or diverting it to other foci (bishops?).
The works of Buchanan and Tullock were subject to searching criticisms in reviews because of their assault on the myth of the selfless bureaucrat. It cannot be denied that they were harbingers of the radical right and had enormous influence on the GOP (NB, Reagan’s aphorism about the threatening words, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”); they were an influence on the late Antony Jay (‘Yes Minister’), amongst others, and they may be one of the reasons why the official response to the virus and other crises in the US and UK has been problematic. However, as critiques of the bureaucratic mind their work still has some value, not least for understanding the modern Church, which is increasingly bureaucratic even as it implodes.
Froghole’s comments: ‘If the main decisions are made by layfolk with no pastoral experience, it might help to explain some of the pastorally abysmal nature of some diocesan decision-making, though that does not, of course, absolve the bishops’. Are rather pertinent. I also appreciated his reference to ‘Yes Minister’, a brilliant education in the inner world of politics and not entirely tongue-in-cheek.
When I was receiving accountancy training we were briefed that the most powerful person in the office was the person with the keys to the stationery cupboard! This dates me obviously but there was some truth in the assertion, back in the olden days of pencils, pens and analysis paper.
One clue to where power holders may lurk is around shortages or scarce resources. In business it’s good salespeople or skills in search engine optimisation.
In the diocese, where money is tight it would not surprise me at all if the accountant has undue influence. Control gives power. There is more than a little opportunity for creativity in this area, as the numerous financial scandals across the world attest. But just simply controlling the purse strings can be quite an obstruction for others.
I’m rather of the opinion that much of what happens at diocesan level depends on the whims and fancies of the Bishop, and at parish level those of the incumbent.