Explorations

Alexander, Loveday Alexander

• Publisher: Church House Publishing
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780715147382
• eBook ISBN: 9780715147405
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Faithful Improvisation is both a contribution to a current vigorous debate about how the Church trains its leaders and a practical and theological resource for discerning what the Spirit is saying and then acting upon it in local church contexts.

Part 1

THE FAOC REPORT

Senior Church Leadership:

A Resource for Reflection

Preface

The following report from the Faith and Order Commission of the Church of England originated from a motion passed at the General Synod in 2009. The motion asked for a report ‘(i) bringing together existing material in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion relating to the exercise of senior leadership in the Church; and (ii) setting out biblical and theological perspectives to inform the Church’s developing patterns of senior leadership’.1 Inevitably, the material has evolved in significant ways while the Commission has been working on it over the past five years.

During that time, leadership has remained a crucial area of concern within and beyond the Church of England. It has continued to provoke sharp debates among Christians, often focusing on how best to engage with a perceived ‘secular’ discourse for understanding and developing the ministry of the church. This was evident most recently in some of the initial reactions to the Report of the Lord Green Steering Group, Talent Management for Future Leaders and Leadership Development for Bishops and Deans: A New Approach, released in December 2014.

For reasons that are set out in chapter 2 of our report, it is necessary for the Church of England to respond to particular challenges around leadership, facing all the practical demands that this involves. Our intention, however, is not to make recommendations about how the church should act with regard to specific issues. Nor is it to set out some kind of formal doctrinal position. It is certainly not to provide a leadership manual. Rather, we have understood our task as being to produce a ‘resource for reflection’, as chapter 1 explains – one that can inform the improvisations that the church will continue to require in its practice of leadership and anchor them in faithfulness to the gospel.

What follows embodies the kind of careful dialogue we aim to promote between theological and ‘organisational’ ways of thinking. How do the dynamics of church life and leadership in the New Testament apply to the church today? How might we draw faithfully and creatively on the rich traditions of the church over two millennia concerning authority, responsibility and service? How can we talk constructively about ambition in church life and deal with the realities of disappointment and the experience of failure? These are not just issues for those who exercise senior leadership in the Church of England, and we hope that this report can contribute to fostering serious thought and prayer about them.

A report such as this is indebted to many people working together over an extended period of time, and the current Commission as a whole is responsible for its final content. That said, I would especially like to thank Professor Loveday Alexander and Professor Mike Higton, who have given very generously of their time, knowledge and skill to draft the report and bring it to completion.

The Faith and Order Commission is glad to offer this report as ‘a resource for reflection’ in the hope that it may serve the church’s understanding of itself and the leadership that it requires today.

CHRISTOPHER COVENTRY

Chair, Faith and Order Commission

Introduction

1 At times, it can seem as if everyone in the church is talking about leaders and leadership. There are, for instance, tens of thousands of examples on the internet of people saying ‘the church needs leaders who …’. Type the phrase into a search engine, and you will quickly find people saying that the church needs leaders

• who are bold and alert,

• who can energise people,

• who can cherish and communicate vision,

• who have the skills to lead people through transition and change, and

• who can ensure that we hand the church to the next generation in better shape than we found it.

You will just as quickly find people saying that the church needs leaders

• who are biblically literate and faithfully orthodox,

• who are compelled to minister out of love for God’s Word,

• who know their purpose in Christ,

• who have a personal relationship with God, and

• who live out gospel values.

2 This talk about leadership in the church is very varied. Much of it expresses a need or desire for leadership, for the sake of the flourishing of the church’s ministry and mission – though there are many different accounts of the kind of leadership that will lead to flourishing, and many different accounts of the kind of flourishing hoped for.

3 Much of the talk is about the qualities or characteristics that leaders will need if they are to be faithful leaders, deeply rooted in the faith – though here again there are many different accounts of the nature of that rooting, and many different descriptions of the ways in which we can expect it to be displayed.

4 There is also, however, a good deal of talk that comments critically on all these proposals for leadership, and expresses concern at the very fact that talk about leadership has come to be so prominent in the life of the church – though here, too, there are many different forms of criticism offered, on many different grounds.

5 This widespread and varied talk forms the background against which we have written this report.

1.1 Questions about senior leadership

6 We had a particular remit to focus on senior leadership in the Church of England. ‘Senior leadership’ is not itself a category that is used in formal documents from the Church of England,2 but for our purposes we have taken the term to refer to those who exercise some kind of ministry of oversight (that is, episkope) that extends beyond a particular congregation, especially when it extends regionally or nationally. We have focused most directly on the leadership provided by bishops, but we have tried at various points, and especially in the central biblical exploration, to set that focus against a wider background.

7 Our intention to focus on ‘senior leadership’ arose in response to a cluster of concerns that have surfaced repeatedly in recent years. These have included:

• tensions between legal accounts of church governance that focus on the office of the diocesan bishop in relative isolation, and the collaborative practice of leadership in dioceses by senior staff teams;

• tensions between accounts that focus on the diocesan bishop in relative isolation, and the collegial practice of leadership at national level through the College and House of Bishops;

• questions about the relationship between the leadership of the church by its bishops and the institutional management of the church by its central administration;

• questions about the roles played in cathedrals, dioceses and the national church by senior lay people in key positions, and the need for both recognition and reflection in this area;

• questions about the role of suffragan bishops, about the role of archdeacons and about the relationships between the two, and a lack of consistency between dioceses in the understanding of these roles;

• questions about the processes by which the Church of England encourages, identifies and prepares men and women for senior clergy appointments, and supports them appropriately while in post; and

• questions about the teaching role of the bishops and about the best means to support and develop it.

8 Those specific issues are, however, surrounded by more general questions sparked by the term ‘leadership’ itself.

• What is the relationship between the leadership of individuals and leadership distributed across an institution? Are leaders there to do the leading themselves, or do they enable leadership to emerge at various levels?

• Is leadership always collaborative, and if so who are the partners? To what extent does such partnership need to be expressed in role descriptions and formal frameworks as well as in informal commitments and good intentions?

• Where, in a collaborative and collegial vision of ministry and mission, is there room for prophetic and critical leadership, and for individual accountability and responsibility?

• To what extent are wisdom and expertise about senior leadership from other institutions (businesses, the public sector, academic research) directly transferable to the life of the Church of England?

• To what extent can the church’s wisdom and expertise about senior leadership be useful in other organisations and institutions in the world?

• Can the church be honest, transparent and rigorous in seeking to nurture the senior leadership it needs while giving proper ‘honour’ to every member of the body (1 Corinthians 12.12–31), and without discouraging those whose calling is in other spheres?

9 The main questions that faced us as we began our work were therefore:

• Is it right to make ‘leadership’ a central idea in the life of the church?

• If so, what are the underlying theological principles that inform the exercise of leadership within the church?

• How can these principles best inform the exercise of senior leadership in the Church of England today?

1.2 The purpose of this report

10 In Section 2 of this report, we will examine both the rise of leadership language in the life of the church and some of the criticisms that have been made of it. We recognise that this language is not going away any time soon. It has simply become too prevalent and too deeply embedded, and we acknowledge that this is in part because it can name important needs in the church’s life. Rather than arguing about whether we should stop using leadership language, therefore, we discuss how this language might be used well, and how the dangers involved can be recognised and avoided. Our initial, provisional answer to the first question (‘Is it right to make “leadership” a central idea in the life of the church?’) is therefore: ‘It is unavoidable – but we should treat it with caution.’

11 For the second question (‘If so, what are the underlying theological principles that inform the exercise of leadership within the church?’) we turn to the church’s traditional resources of ‘Scripture, tradition and reason’. That is, we seek to shape our understanding of leadership by means of a reasoned engagement with Scripture, in conversation with the ongoing Christian tradition. In Section 3, we explore the practice of leadership in the New Testament – not because such a study can provide a simple blueprint for our practice today, nor because it can answer all the questions we might have, but because it witnesses to the deepest demands to which all attempts at faithful Christian leadership must respond. In Section 4 we offer a necessarily brief description of some of the ways in which Christians have responded to those demands through the history of the church, constantly adopting and adapting the practices of leadership they inherited from previous generations in the light of their changing context. In Section 5 we draw out a series of lessons for the contemporary exercise of leadership (especially senior leadership) in the church today.

12 We do not claim, however, to provide a detailed answer to the third question, ‘How can these principles best inform the exercise of senior leadership in the Church of England today?’ That is because compelling answers to that question are not developed in the pages of reports. They are developed in situ, hammered out in context by Christians drawing deeply on the Scriptures, engaging with the tradition, attending to their situations, questioning and challenging and encouraging one another, and discovering prayerfully over time what bears fruit and what does not.

13 In other words, good answers to this question are produced by faithful improvisation, in the never-ending diversity of contexts in which the church finds itself. By ‘improvisation’, we do not mean ‘making it up as we go along’ or ‘bodging something together from the materials available’. Rather, we are drawing on the way that ‘improvisation’ has been written about by a number of theologians in recent years,3 and are using the word in something like the sense it can have in musical performance. Musicians who are deeply trained in a particular tradition (who know its constraints and possibilities in their bones) draw on all the resources provided by that formation to respond creatively to new situations and to one another. Compelling and faithful answers to the church’s questions about leadership require something of the same deep ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• About the Editors
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1 The FAOC report
• Part 2 Theological Reflection on Leadership
• Part 3 Continuing the Conversation
• Postscript: Leadership within Rachel Treweek
• Copyright