There are words in English that can have, according to their context, a positive or negative meaning. We can refer to a person with strong convictions in a positive way; alternatively, the word conviction implies that the individual is somehow deluded and worthy of our pity. Conviction may be an attachment to the latest conspiracy theory or perhaps to a deeply held spiritual insight. The second use of the word is one that attracts approval, something which is not true of the first. The context in the way a word like this is used helps us to know which way we are expected to understand it.
A second word with potentially positive and negative connotations is the word ‘ambition’. Ambition is frequently thought of in a positive way. A young person setting out on a career is expected to be ambitious. The implication is that he/she will use their skills in their chosen profession to achieve promotion, increased pay, and greater responsibility. We congratulate the hospital registrar we know who is raised to be a consultant. The Army captain who becomes a major also attracts our congratulations. In hierarchical systems with clearly defined promotion scales, the mechanism of rising through the ranks is well set out. Some make it to the top of their profession, while many others languish in a much lowlier role. Sometimes the ‘failures’ leave the hierarchical system they are in altogether, to find a different job in which they feel that they can go up a new hierarchical ladder.
Climbing hierarchies in the workplace is a normal part of life and we do not give it a great deal of thought. But the existence of a motivation or ambition, which energises the individual to do what is necessary to climb the ladder of promotion, is worth thinking about. What binds together every example of ambition I can think of, is that the ambitious person is out to achieve power. Such power is not in itself bad or good, but it has the potential to be either. When we list all the positive examples of personal power available to the ambitious person, there are many that are good. Power allows one’s personal contribution in an organisation to be heard more readily. Being taken more seriously by others at your workplace is gratifying. There are, of course, material benefits in promotion – higher salary, bigger house and maybe opportunities for travel. Ambition allows one to enjoy the perks of status and prestige.
The mention of prestige and status brings us to the point when positive and negative aspects of ambition begin to interact. The enjoyment of being important can become something that can subtly change the individual. Readers of this blog will be used to my mention of narcissistic issues. The classic case of a narcissistic disorder is found when a individual, deprived of the right kind of attention as a small child, finds ways of extracting attention as an adult from those around them. Being important in an institution becomes not just enjoyable, but we can find here a kind of addiction to receiving flattery and adulation from those lower in a hierarchy. Ambition has allowed the individual to reach the dangerous and toxic point where they sustain ‘narcissistic feeding’ at the expense of others in the organisation who have less power.
We have now arrived at the point where we can see ambition being used, on occasion, as a means to obtain the kind of power that helps the individual assuage emotional wounds stemming from childhood traumas. The ambition that that may have started off well has now become something potentially harmful and toxic. Bullies in a hierarchical institution achieve their gratification and self-soothing because their ambition has placed them in a setting where they can do so. At some point a positive responsible ambition has been twisted into something negative. The positives of good ambition have been changed to become the negatives of self-gratification and narcissistic exploitation of others.
This reflection brings me into a consideration of ambition in the Church and especially in our own C/E. We might begin by asking ourselves whether hierarchical ambition should ever have any part to play in an institution founded by Jesus. Whether good or bad, we see very quickly that ambition is far from absent in the Church as we know it. As a young curate in the 70s, I was ambitious, but not to become a bishop or archdeacon. My ambition was to rise above the status of a curate to gain some control over my living conditions and unsympathetic treatment by training incumbents. In my first curacy my living accommodation was separated from another flat by a piece of hardboard. I found myself forced to sleep between 9 and 11am every day to make up for lost sleep caused by wailing infants downstairs. My second curacy required me to live in the Vicarage with no access to a private phone. My ambition was to rise above these serious limitations to my well-being. Eventually I did achieve an ambition to be a parish priest and along the way I managed to develop other specialist ministries in ecumenism and healing.
Having spent over forty years in the parochial ministry, I have been able to observe individuals among the clergy caught up in what we might describe as an ‘ambition-bug’. Their behaviour and their anxiety to be known in the right places and by the right people seemed obvious. These efforts seldom achieved their aim. My own good fortune was to recognise that I had no ambitions to climb any ladder of clerical ambition so that such aspirations did not affect me. What are the motivations for clergy to aspire for preferment and additional responsibility? Among the positive motivations for seeking to be promoted in the Church are a recognition that one actually has the right gifts for a particular role. Gifts of music or liturgical administration might funnel some off into cathedral work. Some individuals also have to exercise gifts of administration as archdeacons or bishops. But, recognising this, we cannot ignore the words of Jesus on the topic of ambition and promotion among his disciples. He stated that whoever wants to be the greatest among you must learn to copy him and be the servant of all. In actual practice we know how difficult it is for bishops to spend much time with individuals. One wonders whether being tied up with endless structures and committees is sometimes a deliberate ploy by senior clergy to avoid spending time with actual people. The time that I was given to speak to a bishop, one to one, over my forty years of active ministry, amounts to less than three hours. Today, the new flurry over safeguarding has seen our diocesan bishops presiding over ever more complex patterns of administration with the oversight of safeguarding experts. One thing that bishops do not appear to do is to spend more time with abuse survivors, hearing their story and weeping with them in their pain. It is almost as if the safeguarding juggernaut of today is designed to be a means to separate the reality of people in pain from those who have successfully climbed the ladder of promotion. Is ambition in the Church an indirect way for chosen clergy to escape the brutal reality of people’s pain?
I mentioned earlier that ambition in the church and elsewhere seldom ends up with a happily ever after scenario. Two things mean that any church dignitary, whether bishop, archdeacon or cathedral dean, is likely to face some highly difficult situations directly related to survivors of abuse of various kinds. There is no doubt that the church structures are being ‘stress-tested’ by all the revelations of abuse and bullying that are current in the church today. Now that much of the traditional deference towards bishops and others has been stripped away, the nakedness and fallibility of dignitaries is exposed to view. In the past dozen or so years, the ubiquity of the internet has made it impossible to hide from the past. Access to newspapers, official reports with their findings and recommendations, is available to all. The second thing that has started to catch up with the Church is the way that serious training for pastoral care among clergy seems less of a priority than it used to be. Shorter part-time courses of training must make it more difficult for the educators of the clergy to impart the pastoral wisdom that was possible in the age of universal residential training. Some of the crass statements or missteps coming from bishops and others show a chronic failure of sensitivity and human insight. The expression ‘trauma-informed’ has entered the safeguarding discourse recently. Few of those in the hierarchy or the among the safeguarding establishment seem to have much idea of what it means. In the absence or failure of an adequate pastoral response to survivors, the damage encountered by them is experienced and described quite simply as institutional re-abuse.
Clergy within the CofE who feel an ambition to take on roles among the higher ranks of clergy follow that path with a health-warning. There appear to be at present many among the top tiers of the hierarchy who are stressed to the point of burn-out. At what point will the burden of such office be seen, in some places, to be so universally and clearly toxic, that candidates will simply refuse to be considered? I have already suggested that the highly prestigious post of Bishop of Winchester will be very difficult to fill. The pressures on the holder of that post will be massive. The same thing goes for the post of Sub-Dean of Christ Church. The powers that be may believe that, in spite of all the malfeasance and thorough nastiness circulating around the College, there are willing and suitable candidates available. That assumption remains to be tested. When the path of ambition in the Church of England is shown up to be a road with impossible obstacles to be negotiated, something drastic will need to change in the way the whole Church is organised.
At the risk of seeming facetious might I also add the effect of the ‘Peter Principle’ –
‘In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence’.
If you’ve been in leadership, it’s difficult. Even if you have a gift the work can become very troubling, especially with people issues.
If you’re hoping for high office because you crave the recognition you never had, forgive the impertinence, but this will never be enough for you. I’m not suggesting ignoring your ability and not at least stretching your self, good things these, but find your limits, and those of your family, if you’re lucky enough to have one, and stick within them.
Autonomy is a great aspiration, as Stephen describes, and well worth striving for.
As Richard Ashby reminds us, our shortcomings quickly catch up with us with promotion. Such weaknesses as we possess, whilst trivial at lower grades, are magnified many times in the public and unavoidable exposure at the top.
I think that the key difference compared with ambition in a bank or major commercial enterprise (where the pecuniary rewards are often so high that it pays to get even a brief shot at the top), the armed forces or medicine, is that they actually matter. The problem with reaching positions of command in the Church is that, if you get there, you are in command of what, exactly? A tiny and ageing remnant. It like being in command of a minute deserted island being fast enveloped by the sea.
The leadership of the Church at present is a picture of almost unrelieved mediocrity, or worse, and this is no surprise. Very few people of talent have taken orders since at least the third quarter of the 19th century (when clerical incomes collapsed in the wake of the agricultural depression which eviscerated tithes). Much as parliament offset the loss of empire via increasing the centralisation of domestic policymaking, so bishops have offset the massive loss of importance and prestige by plunging into what can be described most charitably as administrative nonsense. Stipendiary headcount is now only a small fraction of what it was even 50 years’ ago, despite a significant rise in population, and yet some bishops are too inept and/or lazy to engage properly with their clergy. That Mr Parsons spent as little as 3 hours over 40 years with any bishop is perhaps a measure of their very limited worth.
However, as contemptibly craven as many contemporary clerical careerists are, they arguably have nothing on some of their forbears. For example, the diaries of Joseph Price, a parson in 18th century east Kent are full of entries in which he records doomed if oleaginous pleas for preferment, and we can assume this was fairly typical (‘A Kentish Parson: Selections from the Private Papers of the Reverend Joseph Price, Vicar of Brabourne, 1767-86’, eds., G. M. Ditchfield and Bryan Keith-Lucas (1991)). The Revd William Collins in Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ was therefore not much of a caricature, and was drawn from life. Many clergy were quite shameless in their opportunistic and self-interested toadyism, so when Newcastle gave way to Bute in 1762, it was remarked of the rush of clergy paying court to the new prime minister that:
“Whom oft he had helped to accomplish their ends,
Peers, commoners, ribbands, blue, red (but no green),
All, crowding around the old statesman were seen.
But Wagstaff observing on looking around
That no grateful prelate was there to be found,
Cried out: What! none of the black and white Order
From our warm Land’s End to cold Caledon’s border.
I know that your Grace many of them has made.
True: but vile ingratitude sticks to their trade.
For none are so famous (see Wolsey in Baker)
As these reverend dons for neglecting their maker.”
(from Norman Sykes, ‘The Duke of Newcastle as Ecclesiastical Minister’, English Historical Review, Jan. 1942 (v. 57, No. 225), 59-84, at 76).
I’m currently in hospital ( compound fracture of the ankle). The very pastoral chaplain tells me they oversee ordinands on placement, and some of them say openly they’re not interested in pastoral work. They see themselves instead as enablers and managers.
That is very bad news for parishioners. It’s also bad news for the Church’s survival – in my experience good pastoral care is one of the more effective forms of mission.
Oh dear, to both parts of your post. I hope they’ve sorted you out, and it’s now just a matter of painkillers and time. All the best for a speedy and full recovery. I pray that you are soon well enough to be bored!
I am sorry to read of your accident, and hope that you are as comfortable as possible, and make a rapid recovery.
I am also distressed to read of the hospital chaplain’s experiences. The job of a minister is threefold: (i) preaching the Word; (ii) administering the sacraments (and taking worship); and (iii) pastoral care. It is pastoral care which seems to me to be much the most important element, and yet I am afraid I have encountered rather too many clergy who would be amongst the last people I would ever go to for support in a crisis. This is why my attitude towards the clerical profession is often highly ambivalent, and why I have expressed rather anti-clerical views on occasion. It’s a profession I dearly want to like, indeed love, and yet the reality falls short of the ideal rather too often for comfort.
If it is the case that there are candidates for ordination who merely aspire to be managers, then I do feel that the chaplain needs to tell them (or their DDO) that they are wasting their time and the Church’s money. They will be a long-term deadweight cost to the Church, which it can ill afford; indeed, they might do it active harm and be worse than useless. I am trying to express myself as tactfully as possible.
Again, I hope you get better soon. Very best wishes.
That’s nasty Janet and I hope the operation is a success. Very best wishes for a steady recovery, Steve
Ambition destroys other people. The Archdeacon desperate to be a bishop sacrificed our parish to it.