St Gregory and managerialism

Abstract

The Church of England has always congratulated itself on its ecclesiological pragmatism, a pragmatism rooted in Augustine’s mission to Kent. Does this pragmatism encompass every secular innovation or should St Gregory’s directions to the Roman missionaries provide us with a proper scepticism when faced with some of the business world’s more ideological assumptions?

Keywords

ideology managerialism mission pragmatism St Augustine of Canterbury strategic planning

Baptizing the pagan places

The early years of the Roman mission to Kent were anxious times for the missionaries: they were faced with a deeply heathen society, rather than the more familiar Arian heretics of northern Italy. How were they to deal with the culture, rituals and practices they found? A reverse mission was sent back to Rome carrying a package of questions. One of Pope Gregory’s replies set the seal on a particular Anglican form of pragmatism. On no account, says Gregory, are the pagan temples to be destroyed. They are to be emptied of their idols, asperged, and altars set up in them. In this way, the people might be ‘changed from the worship of devils to the service of the true God’. When the people ‘see that their shrines are not destroyed they will be able to banish error from their hearts and be more ready to come to the places they are familiar with, but now recognizing and worshipping the true God’.¹

Gregory’s pragmatism would have appealed to Augustine, for, as Henry Mayr-Harting describes him, we see in the first Archbishop of Canterbury:

the man of affairs, organizing bishops’ sees, framing questions on law and administration to put to the pope, persuading and helping Ethelbert to draw up in writing a code of laws … making arrangements for the protection of church property, and conferring with British churchmen … it is impossible to mistake the air of a man intent on doing a brisk and efficient piece of business.²

Thus we see Augustine’s expediency, a man who appreciated and acted upon the ‘insights of administration … creatively adopted and adapted for fruitful and competent administration by and in the church’.³ This attitude has continued in the Church of England to the present day. In the Guidelines for the Professional Conduct of Clergy we are told, ‘Good administration enables good pastoral care.’⁴ Francis Bridger’s ‘Theological Reflection’ in the same document denies that such guidelines are ‘a concession to managerialism’. Utilizing the insights of professionalism and management is better seen as ‘an attempt to work out in concrete terms the practice of vocation in a contemporary setting’.⁵ We need not be wary of ‘an unthinking acceptance of the cult of managerialism’.⁶

But Bridger’s reflection, a fine example of Anglican pragmatism, glosses over the distinction between management and managerialism. The two are not the same.

Management begat managerialism

Management as a discipline, with theoreticians and practical exemplars, was a result of the growth of Complex Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the West from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.⁷ Complex Industrial Organizations required complex negotiations between the allocation of resources and the assessment of profit. Those who led the negotiations and made the decisions, the manager, became the centre and summit of the organization: ‘The manager’s desk should be the Alpha and Omega of every transaction. It should also be the information bureau of the establishment. No work should be done without the manager’s authority and sanction.’⁸ Because the CIO became the source of great wealth in the West during the twentieth century, it was thought that the structure of the CIO, management as the means of balancing resources and allocating profits, was the cause of their success. Management controlled the ‘flow of internal impersonal statistics’ by means of ‘a large number of specially, often technically trained managers’ who were ‘a new type of decision-making unit and … a new class of decision makers’.⁹ Quickly, the assumption grew that business management could be and should be applied to other areas of human endeavour. This assumption, the universal applicability of business administration, is what we might call ‘managerialism’.¹⁰ As John Quiggen succinctly puts it:

The central doctrine of managerialism is that the differences between such organisations as, for example, a university and a motor-vehicle company, are less important than the similarities, and that the performance of all organisations can be optimised by the application of generic management skills and theory. It follows that the crucial element of institutional reform is the removal of obstacles to ‘the right to manage’.¹¹

This is, in fact, an ideology, and to many proponents of managerialism, such as Christopher Pollitt, it is an unanswerable and unremarkable thesis.¹² Managers have the right to manage; management is ‘an essentially dynamic force’ (as opposed to ‘administration’); there is no distinction between public and private sectors; managerialism is essentially and morally prior to politics (the latter is ‘a realm of disorder, amateurism, short-sightedness, conflict and drama; the former is a realm of order, professionalism, dynamic, and strategic thinking’).¹³ The manager should be known as ‘a moral agent working to achieve the greatest good, not only for their organizations, but for society as a whole’.¹⁴

MAPping the pagan places

We can see an example of the ideology at work when we look at the sub-set of managerialism which is strategic planning. This is the latest manifestation of management within the Church of England, seen in the burgeoning popularity of MAPs (Mission Action Plans), a melding of secular strategic planning and the Church’s mission. Thus, a MAP is simply, according to its advocates Chew and Ireland, ‘a document which outlines the mission activities that a local church is going to do in the coming months and years’ produced because ‘research is needed, reviews have to be conducted, opinions must be explored, priorities have to be assessed, resource plans must be made and decisions have to be taken’.¹⁵

Chew and Ireland deny that MAP might be ‘just another management fad’. They distinguish between ‘key processes’ and ‘management tools’. The latter are subject to change, decay, fashion and faddishness.¹⁶ Processes remain constant and necessary, and MAP is an example of process.¹⁷ Furthermore, MAP has strong biblical and ecclesial roots, in such things as the stewardship of the Pastoral Epistles, planning in Romans and the Lukan parables, the biblical image of growth, the work of the Natural Church Development movement, and the Great Commission.

Chew and Ireland might have cited, but did not, the modest pragmatism of Pope Gregory’s advice to Melitus: ‘[I]t is doubtless impossible to cut out everything at once from their stubborn minds: just as the man who is attempting to climb to the highest place, rises by steps and degrees and not by leaps.’¹⁸ Step by step does it, and not just a random series of steps. We need to know where we are going, and then examine our progress in a reflective and critical manner.

Curiously, the Church of England has discovered strategic planning thirty years after its shortcomings were identified in the secular business world. ‘After more than a decade of near-dictatorial sway over the future of U.S. corporations, the reign of the strategic planner may be at an end,’ reported Business Week in 1984. Reasonably enough, one might think when ‘few of the supposedly brilliant strategies concocted by planners were successfully implemented’. As the CEO of General Motors, the corporation most closely associated with strategic planning, said, ‘we got these great plans together, put them on the shelf, and marched off to do what we would be doing anyway. It took us a little while to realise that wasn’t getting us anywhere’.¹⁹

As Henry Mintzberg has said noted:

[M]ost so-called strategists, however, just sit on top and pretend to strategize. They formulate ever-so-clever strategies for everyone else to implement. They issue glossy strategic plans that look wonderful and take their organizations nowhere with great fanfare. Strategy becomes a game of chess in which the pieces—great blocks of businesses and companies—get moved around with a ferocity that dazzles the market analysts.²⁰

From within the Church Percy has warned against the ‘inexorable rise’ of MAPs. He identifies the confusion in much MAP material between ‘growth’ and ‘multiplication’.

The church is not a body that is supposed to be ever-more productive, like a factory or industry that simply improves its output year on year. It is an organic body of wisdom, in which pruning, seasons, life and death, course through its very veins. It is about renewal and resurrection—so also about letting go, and death. It is about love and loss, and the hope of things to come.

MAPs, by their very nature (concentrating on the things that can be measured – the fallacy of predetermination), confuse ‘extensity for intensity, popularity for depth, and acquisition for wisdom’. The Church is required to follow Christ, and to give up all in that following, even its own life: ‘The church is not called to success, but to faithfulness.’²¹

MAPs are an expression of the greatest fiction of the ideology of managerialism, namely, moral neutrality. Alasdair MacIntyre refuted this fiction, as have people writing from within the world of management and management studies; for example, Locke and Spender, Mintzberg, Stewart and Enteman.²² It is curious how this fiction has survived and, indeed, thrived, when James Burnham, one of the earliest proponents of the ‘managerial revolution’, described how managerialism was the inevitable precursor to totalitarianism – an idea which so appalled George Orwell that he wrote his most famous book about the character of a managerial-totalitarian society.²³ Managerialism, with its four mythic components of economic efficiency, universal applicability, caste conformity and moral neutrality, is ultimately, profoundly, anti-democratic:

The managerialist society is not one which responds to the needs, desires, and wishes of a majority of its citizens. In the managerialist society, influence is exercised through organization. The society responds to whatever the managements of various organizations can gain in their transactions with each other. If people belong to an organization which effectively represents their interests, they may get some response. If they do not, they probably will not.²⁴

Martyn Percy illustrates the danger of the fiction with a thought experiment, set in Babylon at the time of the Exile:

You can imagine the Israelites in, say, Babylon, and those wonderful, whispering voices of Anglican accommodation that would’ve been around even then, turning round to the leaders and to the prophets saying, ‘Now look. We’re not really saying that we want to dump Jehovah. All we are saying is that the Babylonians have done really rather well for themselves. They have nice gardens. They seem to be running rather good water-systems. The roads are excellent; health-care provision is good. So, we’re really saying how about a bit of a mixed economy here? How about giving these gods a bit of a run, and keeping on with Jehovah, and let’s see how it goes?’²⁵

Active and contemplative

It is often forgotten, in the rush to congratulate ourselves on our Anglican pragmatism, that Pope Gregory sent another letter at the time of his advice to Mellitus. This letter was to King Ethelbert, in which the flatteringly and inaccurately named ‘King of the English’ was admonished to:

hasten to extend the Christian faith among the races subject to you, redouble your righteous enthusiasm in their conversion, hunt down the worship of idols, and overturn the building of temples, by encouraging the morality of your subjects with your great purity of life, by terrifying them, by flattering them, by correcting them and by showing them the example of good deeds.²⁶

In other words, paganism was to be eradicated, through both physical and exemplary means. Buildings were to demolished, good deeds erected in their place.

The business-like Augustine was able to achieve Gregory’s advice, but not by being business-like. The life of the Roman missionaries in Canterbury emulated the life of the early Church:

They were constantly engaged in prayers, in vigils and fasts … they despised all worldly things as foreign to them; they accepted only the necessaries of life from those they taught; in all things they practised what they preached and kept themselves prepared to endure adversities, even to the point of dying for the truths they proclaimed.²⁷

It was ‘effective’: ‘Many found faith and were baptized through their admiration of the simplicity of it all.’²⁸

Footnotes

Notes

Author Biography

Justin Lewis-Anthony is Dean of Students at Virginia Theological Seminary, having formerly been Rector of St Stephen’s, Canterbury, and Precentor of Christ Church, Oxford.