Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has made a rather startling remark about Church bureaucracy. He was in a conversation at Unherd about evil and the demonic in culture—especially “the erosion of standards of truthfulness in public life and the normalisation of violence in word and deed”. And he was also worried about a church “too preoccupied with strategy — with schemes for solving problems — and not preoccupied enough with its own integrity as a community of witness and prayer.” Was this, too, demonic? “In a word, yes”, explaining that the diabolical is a “pull to the destructive and towards a kind of idolatry of the self and the corporate self and its well-being and security and control.”
Comment on the demonic.
I know very well that Williams intensely dislikes bureaucracy and ‘managerialism’; I learnt it from him in personal conversation, but also from observation when I joined the Archbishops’ Council just over ten years ago. The Council then appeared to have inherited a fairly chaotic set-up, and despite significant improvements, I still have major questions about its effectiveness.
To make sense of Williams’ comment, we first need to recognise that there are four kinds of bureaucracy: the necessary; the effective; the needless; and the damaging.
Some bureaucracy is necessary. The Church of England is not a gathered community of the committed; it is the steward of 16,000 parishes, thousands of listed buildings, hundreds of schools, and a legal and financial architecture of extraordinary complexity. Someone has to manage the pension fund. Someone has to sign off on the faculty application for the leaking roof. That is not to say this is all done well at the moment; those administering the bureaucracy often need to be better connected with those affected by it. And there is real scope for simplifying it.
And much of this is driven by where we are as a culture. Safeguarding failures — catastrophic, real, and genuinely evil — demanded new systems and new oversight. Employment law changed. Charity law changed. The expectations of insurers, auditors, and regulators changed. Much of what looks like bureaucratic sprawl from the outside is, on examination, the church trying to behave responsibly in a world that holds institutions to account in ways it simply did not fifty years ago.
I think it might be possible to say that there is something evil in this cultural change—in that it is driven by a lack of trust and openness that was taken for granted a generation ago. But that cannot be said of our response to this culture.
So what of effective bureaucracy? Williams’s critique appears to assume that the structural and the spiritual are necessarily in tension. This is a very Anglican sort of anxiety, but it is not obviously true. The early Methodists were extraordinarily organised. The Catholic religious orders that evangelised medieval Europe ran on rules, rotas, and hierarchy. The Jesuits, arguably the most effective missionary movement in Christian history, were essentially a spiritual army with a chain of command. Structure does not preclude evangelism. What precludes evangelism is a failure of nerve, a loss of confidence in the Gospel, and a reluctance to speak plainly about what the church actually believes. Those pathologies are not caused by having too many diocesan committees (though these might be a symptom). They run much deeper.
The key question here is whether the bureaucracy is serving the goals of the gospel, or hindering them. A common complaint is that the process of application for funds for mission initiatives (from the ‘Strategic Mission and Ministry Investment Board’) is too demanding—too bureaucratic. But the aim of the process is to ensure that those applying have really thought through what they are trying to do, and that this is based on evidence—as all charitable expenditure needs to be. This is a guard not merely against lack of trust, but against our tendency to kid ourselves that we are doing the right thing before we have asked serious questions of ourselves. It is intended to be bureaucracy that serves the mission goal, even if it sometimes fails to do that.
Paul tells his readers in Corinth that ‘I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth’ (1 Cor 3.6). Can we think strategically about our planting and our watering—and still believe that God alone gives the growth? This is where we encounter the possibility of needless bureaucracy, which is closely related to the damaging.
Williams is right that organisations develop interests of their own, that process can become an end rather than a means, and that caution can calcify into timidity. These are real dangers that we need to be alert to. A recent survey of how clergy use their time found that, on average, they spend more time on admin than preparing their sermons. Is that because of an evil culture of bureaucracy, or because clergy are easily drawn from the important to the merely urgent? Or is it a collusion of the two? As I travel around different churches, my impression is that some other denominations seem to be able to engage in mission with much less bureaucracy than the Church of England. What can we learn from them?
The remedy is not to abandon structure, or attack it as demonic; it is to keep structure in its proper place — accountable to mission, transparent in its costs, ruthlessly pruned when it genuinely fails to serve.
And if we are going to prune, perhaps we should begin at the top? Why do we have as many bishops, archdeacons, and duplicate diocesan structures as we had when the C of E was twice the size it is now? Williams is certainly right on one point: we need to be preoccupied with our “own integrity as a community of witness and prayer.” Would appointing bishops who actually believe the doctrine of their own church be a good place to start?
(add comments on episcopos, gift of administration, solutions, delegation, management control…)
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