Saturday 25 April, Edinburgh. In the morning, I took my 3 year old twins to their first ballet class. By taxi. Next, we returned home to await the arrival of our new sideboard, in which to store all our ancestral china and tablecloths. Then Granny arrived, bringing the twins a massive Georgian dolls’ house, complete with fake food and fire irons. Could anyone have had a more frightfully middle-class first-world day?
“On Saturday 25 April a massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Nepal. It severely shook the lives of at least 5.3m people and left many homeless. Nepal’s major cities, including the capital Kathmandu, have been badly damaged and rural areas near the epicentre have been completely cut off by avalanches. Latest reports suggest over 5,000 people have been confirmed dead and the figure is likely to rise in the coming days. Even those whose homes are still standing are sleeping in the streets because they are terrified by regular aftershocks.”
And my girls have a fully functioning dolls’ house, with lights that work.
I remember being in the pub when the news of Typhoon Haiyan hit in 2013, and as the news tickered across the TV screens, this was what the regulars asked me: how could your God let this happen?
What can I say? What can anyone say, that helps?
My nephew was christened just days after yet another tragedy, the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004. His grandfather, the legendary Canon John Sweet, had travelled to Scotland to baptise him, and was left with the unenviable task of preaching about it.
Why, why, why?
I’ll never forget what he said. He refused to answer the question. He just thundered out God’s response to Job: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!”
I love God’s sarcasm when He finally rises to Job’s bait. Of course, it’s sinfully arrogant of us to feel we have a right to understand God, and to think we are best placed to explain God’s actions to others.
As Fred Rogers famously said: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, look for the helpers – you will always find people who are helping.”
And isn’t that the only thing we can do in the face of something so impossible to understand? Rather than wasting valuable time finding the sort of answers that might satisfy us, shouldn’t we be the helpers, so at least people can say: ‘I don’t know what God is up to, but look how these Christians love one another!’
Of course I don’t want to duck the issue. Of course it bothers me too. Of course we should cry to God and shout aloud in all our confusion and pain.
But this isn’t an opportunity for mission, or an opportunity for armchair theodicists. This is an opportunity for us to unite behind the relief effort, so that at least the avoidable deaths that may result from this will not be our fault.
The most pressing question about Nepal isn’t what God may or may not be up to, it’s what we are doing in response. Have you donated yet?
From the Archbishops down, it seems as though everyone is channelling William Temple these days. And why not? It is a strong brand association for a Church ramping up its political engagement, because Temple is famous for having actually driven genuine societal change. So I welcome the recent speech by Archbishop Justin in which he sets out his blueprint for a good economy, built on the four pillars of creativity, gratuity, solidarity and subsidiarity. Subsidiarity (through the Big Society), and solidarity (through the nurture of a community of communities), also feature prominently in the House of Bishop’s excellent pre-election Pastoral Letter.
In the Archbishop’s speech, he begins by explaining that, ‘creativity is a basic human function, and a good economy is one that enables creativity to happen’. Next, he argues that ‘gratuity’ is about an economy that includes a spirit of generosity. It does not seek the maximisation of return, or that every transaction is carried out on a basis of exchange and equivalence. Instead, it recognises that there will be winners and losers, requiring a mix of philanthropy and restraint in profit-making for the good of the whole. Third, solidarity is about, ‘reimaging our economic landscape so that no one is left out or left behind’. Finally, subsidiarity is about asking the question: ‘who is best placed to deliver this?’
In the run-up to the election, Justin Welby is not the only one calling for deep structural change in the way we run our economy. Will Hutton’s latest book, How Good We Could Be offers another blueprint, which focuses on a new Companies Act and revived Trade Unions, in order to embed a genuine stakeholder capitalism and to protect the workforce from any downsides.
Now, I am a huge fan of William Temple. But I am also a fan of his mother, who being an Archbishop’s wife herself, was no slouch. Apparently once, when her son was being particularly bumptious, she said, ‘You may know more than I do, but I know better than you do.’ So, channelling Mrs Temple, might I suggest that neither Welby nor Hutton – nor the Bishops’ Pastoral Letter – go quite far enough?
Like many readers, I have been worrying about the economy for quite some time. First of all, I thought that developments in corporate social responsibility and corporate ethics might do the trick. But over the years these failed to deliver the kind of change I thought was needed. So I decided to spend some time excavating the foundations of modern capitalism, to see if I could identify where things first started to go wrong. Accompanied by my trusty theology degree, I was particularly interested in seeing whether I could prove Einstein wrong in his view that you can’t find solutions from within the paradigm that created the problem in the first place.
What I uncovered was a set of rules well past their sell-by date. I’ve identified seven of these ‘toxic assumptions’, which are now slowly poisoning the system as a whole: assumptions about competition, the ‘invisible hand’, utility, agency theory, pricing, shareholder value, and limited liability. As an example, I am extremely hot on what Welby might see as a creativity/ gratuity/ solidarity/ subsidiarity nexus, in my trashing of the widespread assumption of an ‘Invisible Hand’, as the governing explanation of why everything in the market is destined to come good. Adam Smith coined his famous phrase in an early essay on the history of Astronomy, when he talked about the ‘invisible hand of Jupiter’ in a discussion about the use of God or Gods to explain irregular events in nature. He says that these types of explanation are sociologically important because they ‘soothe the imagination’ when people are perplexed by the mysterious. He then recycles the term to explain the magic of the market in both MoralSentiments and Wealth of Nations.
For Christians, this may be a comfortable formulation, because it reserves fate to God. But modern states are not using the term theologically (probably neither was the rather agnostic Smith). Instead, ‘Invisible Hand’ rhetoric is used by the grown-ups to send us all back off to bed. Maybe one day I will be a grown-up, but I don’t have time to wait for them to fix this at the rate they’re going. Markets are just exchanges for messages about supply and demand. So if you have the most muscle, the market morphs to meet your needs. Which is why we have a market where inequality is spiralling out of control. And to use Welby’s formulation, as a matter of solidarity – and justice – we need to be creative about using our own privileged market position to right some serious global wrongs. In our own community of communities, subsidiarity is all about stepping up, not just waiting for government solutions, and gratuity is about us being prepared for this activity sometimes to feel fruitless or expensive.
For instance, do you shop cheaply or ethically? Fairtrade is a brilliant example of a Temple-style church-led game-changer. Famously started in the UK in the 1970s by students from Durham, by 1998, the fair trade market in the UK was worth around £17 million annually. Now – largely due to sustained support from the churches – it is worth over £1 billion a year. Did you know that a third of the bananas we buy are now Fairtrade, which means that in the UK we eat 3,000 Fairtrade bananas every minute? Creativity – this is a new market. Gratuity – we overpay to provide the Fairtrade premium. Solidarity – buying Fairtrade helps providers in the developing world to get a toe-hold in the market. Subsidiarity – we vote with our cash for a fairer economy every time we shop for groceries.
So let’s embrace Welby’s principles for a good economy, and let’s do everything that Hutton suggests too. And that Pastoral Letter is well worth reading in its entirety. But instead of awaiting the results of the election, or expecting permission, let’s also get busy. You could make a small start by imagining that your bank statements are St Peter’s new appraisal form. What more could you get on there to demonstrate that you are building a just economy for all?
Eve Poole is an Associate Research Fellow of the William Temple Foundation.
It was July 1992 when John Plender dropped a bombshell in the Financial Times, reporting that the Church Commissioners had lost about £800m of their then £3billion portfolio. A year later, I joined the Church Commissioners as a graduate. At one point, around 1995, I was seconded to the Diocese of Chichester for a while. Do you know what their average weekly giving was per head at that point? 97p; in one of the richest dioceses in the land! 1995 was an important year for it was the year in which the Turnbull Commission reported, ushering in the era of the Archbishops’ Council and a slim-lined Church Commissioners. Many would see this change as a pivotal one, because it altered the organisational landscape of the Church of England, and to some degree the balance of power. But I have come to see that it was the Copernican Revolution in parish funding that has really altered the Church of England, because since 1992 the living church – in the parishes – has had to move from being subsidised to being largely self-financing.
It’s hard to find the exact figures, but before 1992 the Commissioners footed about 25% of the Church of England’s annual bill. This included cathedrals, pensions, and clergy stipends. After 1992, it became apparent that not only could the Commissioners not afford to keep paying this, but that the cost of the Church of England was going to increase quite substantially, because of the pension liability. In future, the entire cost of running the parochial system would need to be met by the living church, and not the endowment.
This double whammy of reducing subsidy and increasing costs meant that 97p per head wasn’t exactly going to cut it. Of course, non-conformist churches have always had to pay their own way, and it is not so much this state of events as the transition to it that I think has been so negative for the Church of England. This is partly because it coincided with the 20 year period between the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the collapse in credit when capitalism and the logic of the market reigned supreme. So the narrative has naturally been one of profit and loss, of assets and liabilities, and of sales and marketing.
Embracing the narrative de jour has led the Church into all kinds of trouble, chief of which has been a fundamental change in the clergy’s actual and psychological contract of employment, in pursuit of a well-meaning attempt to modernise the awkwardness of the clergy freehold. This has taken place just when it has become apparent how much secularisation has robbed clergy of their social mandate, compounding a feeling of retrenchment, as parish boundaries are redrawn and clergy are asked to cover ever greater patches, and to be more accountable for their performance. Now many of them talk about a need to keep the faithful happy enough that they keep contributing to the parish share and provide positive feedback for clergy appraisals and career development. So it has become entirely logical that the Church of England should have developed a preoccupation with bums on seats as a key metric both of clergy success and as a way of keeping the show on the road financially.
Thankfully, this currently shows up more in the rhetoric than the statistics. Linda Woodhead’s YouGov numbersreport that 67% of Church of England clergy still think the Church should prioritise ‘England as a whole’ rather than any ‘member’ constituency. But the numbers trail off in the non-established churches. One hopes this is not a direction of travel, as he who pays the piper starts increasingly insisting on calling the tune. Anecdotally, this is already happening in some dioceses, where churches have been known to at least threaten to withhold subsidy from those churches with whom they theologically disagree. Writ large this threatens the parochial system, which depends on cross-subsidy to provide its universal service. And if it can’t, the case for establishment becomes much more evidently one of historical anachronism, if clergy cannot claim in any meaningful sense to be serving the citizenry in every corner of the land.
In the jargon, I think the church is caught at a classic crossroads: should it manage the organisation, or manage the enterprise? As a business person, I can of course see that in pursuit of the former we could easily take out cost, leverage plant, optimise HR, and increase market share. Whether or not this would enhance the Church’s mission, I have doubts. Either way, as Iain McGilchrist reminds us, this is a classic dilemma about attention. McGilchrist’s work shows that the left brain favours the alluring measurability of managing the organisation, while the right brain favours a soft focus approach on the big picture. And while the two hemispheres are complementary, brain plasticity would argue that attending to one more than the other will have the effect, over time, of strengthening the muscle that is most often used. So, while management attention is focused on measures and metrics to improve the organisation, less attention by busy leaders may then be paid to the more nebulous outreach activities, in spite of the fact that these are the very activities that seem best placed to cleanse the church’s toxic brand – Fairtrade, foodbanks, credit unions etc.
And this is the key ecclesiological challenge. These activities, by in large, do not serve those who pay for them through parish share. I welcome initiatives like the former Bishop of Durham’s, to ask the parishes what they want to pay, because I think it is at parish level that the value of these outreach initiatives in the community are really felt. But how do we ensure that a gradual shift towards member-led priority-setting doesn’t drift towards narrow self-interest?
Iain McGilchrist, again, offers some comfort for the church in this regard, because the habits of theology tend to encourage suppleness in the right brain. But only if we resist attempts to convert these habits into left-brain simplicities. You probably saw the headlines when Linda Woodhead’s latest statistics were released, screaming ‘Time to get serious’ and ‘We’ll be dead in 10 years’. If we can keep our heads (both halves of our heads in particular), I don’t buy these predictions. In psychological terms, managerial control is about a need to feel competent by exercising dominion over the environment. God even encourages this by his commissioning of Adam in Genesis, and psychometric research bears out a trend amongst the senior management population to have a strong bias in favour of this tendency. This is all left-brain stuff, and it feels natural. So calls to arms about bums on seats play into a pre-primed mindset, and allow us suddenly to feel like masters again. But we also have, courtesy of Jesus’ many clashes with the Pharisees, a reminder that this should not be allowed to become a snare for the unwary. Mission inward is only ever legitimate if it serves mission outward. It’s not just in the Gospels that the Church is at its most attractive to new recruits – and fresh resources – but when it is manifesting love for the marginalised.
Eve Poole is an Associate Research Fellow of the William Temple Foundation.