If you want to kill something, bring in management consultants. You may think this statement a little sweeping, but we live in a world where it seems almost routinely true.
In fact the management class has taken over to such an extent that everything that makes life worth living, which expands our experience or promotes freedom, is at risk of being stamped out by people whose only real motivation is to promote their own wellbeing.
Amazingly, this is true even of the Church.
Historian Peter Hennessy once said: “If management consultants had drafted the Sermon on the Mount, there would be no Christians anywhere.”
Happily, management was not consulted by Jesus at all, which is what makes the Kingdom of God so attractive. But the current leaders of the Church of England – with some notable exceptions – lean ever more towards solving problems by implementing management “solutions”, often combined with fashionable groupthink.
Why does this happen? Well, managers as a whole – including lawyers, politicians, administrators and consultants – are grossly overpaid; so naturally they want to preserve the status quo. Therefore every solution they come up with aims to avoid disruption of any kind: in the words of Joseph Heller, they routinely “distort reality for the sake of neatness”. They want to smooth things over; keep things quiet.
Which is why inquiries are largely a waste of time, unless they are conducted by an independent spirit who can not only see through the fog but withstand the pressure. Not many of those about.
Of course, the Church of England has never been perfect. Back in 1978 Canon John Collins was saying: “I can assure you, after nearly 50 years in its ministry, the Church of England is riddled with, if not obsessed by, questions of status and precedence.”
This is a very human trait – even the early disciples occasionally fell prey to it – but it is destructive, especially when those caught up in it have real power. And it has nothing in common with Christianity. Quite the opposite.
Of course the Church at a local level contains many people who actually believe, who are self-effacing and want to do good. So against all the odds, I am optimistic. After all, individuals make a difference in the real world.
And then there’s Piers Brandon, who summed it up rather well: “Anything is possible in the C of E,” he said. “Even Christianity.”