Bullying of and by clergy: a way ahead?

Many thanks to people who have posted stories and comments on clergy bullying. This is no more than an open discussion, not a therapy point, but any posting of information and ideas helps break the culture of silence around the subject. I did promise to say what we were doing in our diocese.

Archdeacon Karen and Poli Shajko, our HR Lead, have been scoping a new policy and procedures in the light of the Dignity at Work national documentation, in collaboration with Anne Lee, an Oxford psychologist who specialises in this area. We are going to recruit two confidential non-hierarchical listeners in each archdeaconry, the Parish Development Advisor (who already works and is known by any clergy) plus one - a mixed gender team with access available from any to all. This includes congregational members who say clergy are bullying them, as well as clergy who say congregational members are bullies. We are working with an independent partnership to develop training both for awareness and implementation of a new dignity at work policy, with documents to go to Bishop's Council, then out. I'm not sure how and when this is published around deaneries, but that's got to happen well — a comms job.

It seems to me, along with some comments earlier this month, that everyone knows what bullying is, and when they feel bullied, but the description needs to be in terms of the behaviour that has to change. If we don't do that the onus stays in the wrong place, and things will never improve. The vast majority of claims I have drilled into dissolve into mutual recrimination. So I have to say that the perception of "bullying" boils down to a symptom of organisational malaise, the abuse of power.

We need procedures in place, as for whistleblowing, available to individuals; but this is not enough.

The key to progress is to have a public framework describing the proper use of power against which all behaviour can be measured.

Such a framework makes any anomaly look like an anomaly, rather than just a random incidence of "shit happens."

One final frontier remains, however. Church culture, deferential, hierarchical and often inclined to hypocrisy, breeds an alignment gap between aspiration and active accountability at the top. The Church is full of good intentions but some bishops, forgive me for saying but it's the truth, fear and loathe that kind of open accountability. Confronted recently with a proposed standard policy on appointments, out poured reasons why this was an impossible bureaucratic imposition to clip their wings. Ironically, much practice is consistent with what was proposed, and the law will probably carry my Lords kicking and screaming where they don't want to go.

Why does it have to be like this? Perhaps the Great Sacred Cow of diocesan exceptionalism belongs to good and decent people who think they are doing their best, so where could the problem be? "parked on the candidate, not them" is the answer. The problem is this: Candidates applying for jobs need to have confidence that their applications will be treated consistently and fairly, and that the rules of the game are being observed by everybody involved - or why should they waste their time offering their work and ministry in the first place? Without some public standard applicants will inevitably suspect stitch-ups all over the place without this elementary accountability — even where they aren't happening! So culture has to change at every level in the organisation, if our practice is to align with our values. The problem is not, of course unique to the Church, but this may be the next area in which us Don Quixotes need to grab Sancho and buckle up.

Dickens Lives! Bullies Rule OK!

Back home from Germany to distressing telly — Paul Kenyon’s BBC Panorama Undercover Care: the Abuse Exposed. Joe Casey spent five weeks undercover as a care assistant at a private hospital for people with learning difficulties seemingly run along similar lines to Guantanamo Bay.

Watching it was not easy, but the film demonstrates exactly what public service investigative journalism is for, and deserves major recognition:

The project was planned after a professional nurse blew the whistle on bullying behaviour among some of the care assistants at Winterbourne View, near Bristol. Particular attention focused on a great bullying bear of a carer who had seemingly built a whole culture of harassing those weaker than himself for his own amusement. Let none be deceived. The assessment of oft very limited service users can be challenging work, involving occasional need for physical restraint. This, however, was simply torture.

What do we learn?

1. About Bullies
   There is deep in some people a need to exploit others' weaknesses for their own gratification — to wind people up until they snap and then bring down the panoply of the rules upon them. There is a cruel, bullying streak in our culture at every level. An archbishop of the last century was told his broadcast on the subject of the abdication of Edward VIII had not gone down well with the public because it had appeared to be kicking a man when he was down. “But what’s the point of kicking him if he isn’t?” mused his Grace. Bullying behaviour, even in Church, happens on various levels, and should always be called out for what it is. Go along with the bully and you create the culture in which such behaviour thrives. Indulge them and you will have hell to pay. Remain silent and you collude.
   
   
2. About Hospitals
   The hospital’s owners had a large chest of what turn out to be fatuous awards and service gongs. You cannot legislate compassion and humanity by guidelines and targets. Whilst it’s good to know Wayne and some of his cohorts are currently helping the police with their inquiries, and shooting the sergeant is a classic response to failure, the systemics of their own operation allowed the owners to ignore clear distress signals from their own whistleblowing employee, employ several wildly unsuitable care workers, remain ignorant about what happens on their own property, ignore several injuries amongst the service users — all of these are management and governance failures, in which Wayne played but a walk-on part.
   
   
3. About Regulation and Safeguarding
   The same whistleblower approached the Care Quality Commission — the Government’s regulatory body — and they also ignored him. This raises profound concerns that, again, transcend one official’s judgment in this case, poor as it obviously was. CQC had inspected Winterbourne View three times in the past two years. How did they miss all evidence of wrongdoing, and how can we know that there is not widespread undetected abuse going on elsewhere?
   

Bullying, Bureaucracy, Vague Values?

Do we need a load of bureaucracy to tackle workplace injustice? At heart I am a swashbuckling Cavalier, who would like everything as easy as possible. Too much bureaucracy can actually foul up a process with excess semi-relevant information, and procedures that paralyse action. Ask any police officer. Maybe Bureaucracy is just a standard human activity, like politics, cooking, sex, or religion. If so, there’s good bureaucracy and bad bureaucracy. Small and effective beats big and cumbersone every time. At its best, like electricty in a home, you should be unaware of bureaucracy as a thing in itself. It should just be working away in the background. Ye shall know how good or bad it is by its fruits.

There’s something disturbing about playing off trust against audit trails. Up to the 1850’s you could be a doctor in England by self-definition. Today doctors have to go to medical school and pass exams. There’s far more than a bit of paper involved in the healing art, of course, but the paperwork actually increases, not reduces, my trust when I go to the surgery, as well as reminding my doctor of the story so far. Medical standardization mustn’t stifle creative research, or, even more importantly awareness of the patient as a person, but without some standardization we’d be back where we were in the 1850’s.

How vague are the positive values I suggested were the antidote to cultures of fear and intimidation — diversity, equality, respect? Call them anything you like, but

1. the logic of the Day of Pentecost implies the Church isn’t meant to be definitively homogenized around any particular culture, but incarnate in many cultures. It takes a whole world truly to know Christ.
   
   
2. Jesus had strong views on equality: “call no man Father, for you have one Father and you are brothers.” This was no incidental soundbite, but the cornerstone of a new philosophy of leadership that was not optional. Where the institutional Church has not been wholehearted or disciplined at implemeting that philosophy, it has suffered.
   
   
3. Respect, or the Golden Rule, is the centrepiece of the Sermon on the Mount. Niceness and good intentnions are no kind of substitute for justice. Ask the prophet Amos. His standard is the plumb line, and applying that standard doesn’t happen by accident.

Actually, I don’t see anything vague about these values at all. Life is full of practical opportunities to apply them. What’s truly vague is assuming “anything we do is bound to be OK because we are, after all, the Church, and we’ve been doing it for years...” A Church that is always being reformed has to be healthier than one that thinks it’s arrived.

I think the best way of defending the Church is for it to be authentically and recognizably walking in the way of Jesus Christ.

That means putting in serious, intentional work to focus on and apply these simple gospel values, in ways that can be measured. This involves rejecting deceit, self-deception, corruption and manipulation in our life together, in any practical way that presents itself. And a Church which is always being reformed will, by grace, come closer to being what it was called to be. It will be more missionally attractive than one that is content simply to coast on, with occasional kicking and screaming when it’s caught out.

Dignity at work: Systemics

A few things are becoming clear to me from the excellent discussions we have been having on clergy bullying (of and by):

1. The doctrine of original sin happens to be true, and reveals itself esoecially at work, like it does among drivers. Bad stuff goes on everywhere and at all times. I met a postie recently, who told me his Union took a less than laid-back Buddhist attitude to his refusal to join in a recent strike. One of the worst and most disturbing example of bullying I’ve encountered was of a member of the clergy by a journalist from a national newspaper. So we’re all in this thing together. There is none guiltless, no not one — why should we wish to be deceived?
   
   
2. Christianity is a social and personal means of redemption — a process of grace working through real people. Therefore this phenomenon does matter, and does, continuously, need to be addressed. Failing to engage with it denies dignity to the victim and the possibility of redemption to the perpetrator. G. K. Chesterton was right to say, in his quaint way, “we are sick and very sad who bring good news to all mankind,” but that can never be the last word. Jesus said “by this shall all know that you are my disciples, by the love you have... love one another as I have loved you.” That is the Gold Standard — not a discussion starter, but a way of life.
   
   
3. Whistleblowing and transparency are essential weapons against abuse. They can never, however be the whole answer, because making them so puts most, if not all, the responsibility on the victim, as though it was somehow their fault. This is morally wrong, because it leaves control (with diminished responsibility) in the hands of the institution, not the victim.
   
   
4. Therefore those who lead the institutional Church, fallen people that we are like everyone else, need to do serious intentional work to create a consistent culture of respect and justice within our own spheres of influence and authority. That defends the faith much more effectively than making snarky comments on atheist websites. Throughout the organisation, in every way, as far as lies in us, we have to express values that support human dignity. I have disussed this question carefully with some vastly able big hitters who have led particular UK public institutions through the transformation of their cultures of equality and diversity. This has convinced me that the only way we can transform ours is by producing and enforcing, in a publicly accountable way, routines that express these values. This will sometimes mean the organisation moving ahead of people. So be it. It’s only as this is done that decency becomes the shared norm in any organisation.
   
   
5. The basis for real Church life is not Instutionalism. It’s repentance and faith. As I read the NT I ask “what kind of attitude to relationships would you expect in a community which existed on this basis, and was trying to do it now as a way of life together?” the answer is mutual accountability — each to the other, all to each, each to all, corporately to God. This is the NT principle that is sometimes quaintly called “mutual submission.” We all have eccentricities. One of mine is that when I put a new priest in, and they make their declarations and oaths, I often express publicly my view that this ceremony marks me as being as accountable to them as they are promising to be to me. Ministry is fruitfully exercised with mutual accountability — anything less is a control game that leads easily to abuse.
   
   
6. Finally, please help me out. We are currently considering how to further the work of our Diocesan Committee for Racial Justice to advance Equality and Diversity best practice. The new Equalities Act will bring various strands together, and it’s important for our work to reflect reality and opportunity, and to be morally cogent and consistent with our values. This process of discernment makes me ask, “Prcatically speaking, what kind of a body, involving who, how, will best secure and advance in our diocese our accountability to values of equality, diversity and justice?” all answers, please, gratefully received...
   

Preventing Clergy Bullying (of and by)

Ruth Gledhill’s Times article on the Mark Sharpe case in Worcester has raised fresh allegations about bullying behavour in the Church. I know absolutely nothing except what’s in the papers about its particular details, which need to be worked out and made public by the tribunal. Bullying behaviour goes on, of course, in all working contexts, including the Church — in my experience less so in the Church than in other contexts in which I’ve worked, education and prisons, but any incidence is shameful and wrong.

As a jobbing bishop I've taken a particular interest in the problem, and blogged about it more than once over the past two years. It’s very good to have full and open public discussion. Some of the things that will be said may be offbeam, but many won’t, and the general effect is to raise awarenss of the possibllity of bullying. This, in itself is the best preventative against it.

Whether it’s laypeople bullying clergy or clergy bullying clergy or clergy bullying laypeople, any whiff of bullying needs to be explored and discussed, preferably with area dean or bishop's staff, or someone, fully and accurately as early as possible.

Whoever is allegedly bullying whom, the best response is early awareness. The most problematic cases (of which there is only a very tiny number) are usually situations that have stewed for ages. early investigation shows up anomalies for what they are, and protects everyone. If bullying is not happening, it can be excluded, and if it is, it can be exposed for what it is. Like domestic violence, the key thing is to break the cycle producing it as soon as possible.

The involvement of Rachael Maskell’s union, Unite, has always, in my limited experience of it, been extremely helpful. A good union rep can normalise the whole situation by setting the various anecdotes around it in a broader context, whilst ensuring that their member is well protected. Even more than unions, one organisation has worked long and hard to help in practical as well as awareness-raising ways — the Society of Martha and Mary. Their report Affirmation and Accountability has, since 2002, defined the gold standard to which I have aimed to work on clergy HR. Rachael is absolutely right about the key role of law in protecting laypeople and clergy — sometimes people speak of ecclesiastical law as an anomalous by-product of establishment designed to annoy free spirits. It is actually their baseline protection, and everyone else’s — a key part of the infrastructure.

The successful extension of section 23 rights to all C of E clergy by Common Tenure, a legislative job that began almost 10 years ago and goes live at the beginning of 2011, is absolutely necessary. I have a particular interest, formally, in the implementation group for this change in this diocese, and we all have a part to play. Stories like this demonstrate to any who might have wondered about it, why this piece of work, which has been going on over almost 10 years, is so important to complete effectively. I strongly recommend all clergy to take up the option of common tenure when they’re offered it later this year. Even if they don’t think they need it, the universal takeup of the protection it offers is good for the culture of the whole Church.

When Common Tenure is implemented, this time next year, more legislation could be desirable. I don't think anyone will actually know until the new system has been operating for long enough to assess its impact. In the meanwhile, unions (who have had a battering themselves in the past thirty years) need to work hard to recruit in all sectors, and I support them in doing this.

I’ve worked on this problem with colleagues for years, both as a regular part of my job, and particularly learning about it with Anne Lee, a psychologist from Oxford University. Two particular issues strike me about addressing Bullying:

1. Definitions:
   The term “bullying” itself always needs careful definition according to the context. It's not a simple phenomenon, but there is a big difference between situations where one person perceives it to be going on, and the sort of situation where everybody is alleging it of everyone else.
2. Human nature:
   There is a tremendous variety of person in the Church (as everywhere else): everything from people with personality disorders to serial litigants, with the vast, vast majority well near the centre of the normal scale. Everyone, however, has their own personal needs, personal formation issues, and vulnerabilities. The doctrine of universal original sin is actually a sober fact of life which shows itself particularly in this area — that’s not a reason to ignore it, but to engage with it! A luta continua!
   

This subject does matter. In general, most of the time, the Church is a healing place, but this should be worked for not assumed. It is not always the case, and the best way to make it more so is constant vigilance and public awareness. The Church is a very open organisation — as it should be. Anglicans talk publicly about anything — and this helps with the problem. But the work goes on continuously!

Kicking ’em when they’re down

Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury back in the glory days of 1937, is reported to have had strange views on bullying. His chaplain told him that Lang’s response to the Abdication made many people feel he had kicked a man when he was down. “But what’s the point of kicking a man,” mused his Grace, “if they’re not down?”

Apparently such attitudes are still alive and kicking in the UK workplace. The Equality and Human Rights Commission reports research that indicates some frankly disgusting home truths. Here is a list of workplace behaviours, reported by people with disabilities/ long term illness, and people without. See if you can make it through, without feeling sick. Proportions with a disability/ long-term illness are given in bold, set against a control group without, in italics. The asterisk indicates statistical significance:

1 - Someone withholding information which affects your performance: 18.9% (15.6%)
2 - Pressure from someone else to do work below your level of competence 19.3%* (13.5%)
3 - Having your opinions and views ignored 36.6%* (29.8%)
4 - Someone continually checking up on you or your work when it is not necessary 25.0%* (19.4%)
5 - Pressure from someone else not to claim something which by right you are entitled to 15.8%* (9.8%)
6 - Being given an unmanageable workload or impossible deadlines 41.1%* (31.1%)
7 - Your employer not following proper procedures 35.2%* (22.4%)
8 - Being treated unfairly compared to others in your workplace 21.5%* (16.7%)
9 - Being humiliated or ridiculed in connection with your work 13.4%* (8.7%)
10 - Gossip and rumours being spread about you or having allegations made against you 21.8%* (12.1%)
11 - Being insulted or having offensive remarks made about you 27.4%* (16.2%)
12 - Being treated in a disrespectful or rude way 34.7%* (24.8%)
13 - People excluding you from their group 14.1%* (8.7%)
14 - Hints or signals from others that you should quit your job 14.4%* (8.1%)
15 - Persistent criticism of your work or performance which is unfair 22.5%* (13.4%)
16 - Teasing, mocking, sarcasm or jokes which go too far 18.7%* (13.2%)
17 - Being shouted at or someone losing their temper with you 37.3%* (25.9%)
18 - Intimidating behaviour from people at work 25.4%* (15.2%)
19 - Feeling threatened in any way while at work 19.4%* (12.3%)
20 - Actual physical violence at work 11.6%* (5.5%)
21 - Injury in some way as a result of violence or aggression at work 8.8%* (4.7%)

So your chances of being beaten up are actually 3% higher if you are in a wheelchair. What??! And if you aren’t in a chair, but suffer from a learning difficulty, psychological or emotional condition, the likelihood of these negative experiences at work increases by a sickening 167 %. What, indeed??!

Additional factors that raise the chances of experiencing such behaviour include:

• Sexual orientation - being gay increased negative behaviour by 55 per cent
• Public sector - working in the public sector increased negative behaviour by 57 per cent

I cannot begin to account for these shameful figures, which strike me as way out of kilter with the kind of people we would all, surely, want to believe ourselves to be. One thing is obvious, however. This is a problem for all of us, even though the objects of bullying are picked off one by one on any given occasion. Formal workplace procedures need to be backed by positive understanding and partnership. The Churches should be in the lead, but, sadly, whatever we profess, third sector workers raise their chances of being bullied by 118%.

When and how do we think things are going to change, and how proactive are we willing to be to change them?

h/t Ann Memmott — thanks for drawing this report to my attention

Clergy stress and wellbeing at work

The slow days after Christmas are a good time to check back on the basics. After interesting posts and discussions here this year on Clergy bullying and wellbeing at work, I’ve revisited my standard list of stresses bearing on the health of clergy in multiparish benefices that I drew up a few years ago. An Occupational Health Physician asked for a copy of the person’s job description, to help her assess the health impact of the job. None. The parish profile? All it said was that they wanted a perfect vicar — telling, but insufficiently detailed information. This list was an attempt to summarize where the stresses came from, so as to enable a concerned professional to understand and help.

One of my ambitions for 2009 is to find better ways to care better for appointments and colleagues in work. If others know of other similar lists, I’d love to see them. Revisiting my summary, it seems to me to stand up fairly well to the experience I think colleagues are having — but does it? I’d love to know what I’ve missed, or mis-stated.

Factors bearing on the occupational health of incumbents in multi-parish benefices — a generic handlist

Many general facets of being a Vicar in the country are pluses when things are going well relationally, but significant sources of stress when they are not. For example, being housed free of rates rent and maintenance in a four bedroom family house would generally be thought to be a benefit worth several thousands of pounds a year, but the requirement to live in the parsonage house can become a source of significant stress, inducing a feeling of being trapped, if things break down relationally.

This job always requires a higher degree of capacity to manage a work/life balance than would be the case in an occupation which did not require as much working from home.

Particular dimensions and requirements of the job which bear on health include:

1. Interaction with volunteers and the public —
   dealing professionally with strangers, which requires significant discernment and versatility. For example, The partner of a person who greatly dislikes you may die, and then you have to conduct the funeral cheerfully and competently. Relating to people of all ages, positively and fairly, is easier if clean and effective communication has been established with a variety of people and organizations including key volunteers such as churchwardens and treasurers. Many members of the public have real difficulty knowing how to respond to anger in clergy.
2. Leading public worship —
   including family celebrations and funerals and teaching the Christian faith, by word and example, in a way which is sincere and competent, personally grounded, but outwardly focused.
3. Administration —
   Time and workload management in a basically unsupervised environment, including appropriate record keeping, calls for competent self-management. Work/Life balance needs diligent monitoring and management, and the careful holding of working and relational boundaries in a sustainable way that inspires confidence in others. Hours are mainly flexible and undirected. Clergy aren’t required to, but many of them work longer hours than they should and skimp on holidays.
4. On-call and occasional emergency availability —
   handling personal and family crises (sometimes acute) with an awareness of the needs of others and ability to manage sensitive and confidential materials professionally.
5. Acting as a professional representative of the Church —
   with all the complex and personal transference people may have about religion. This means relating to people with differing views, some of which conflict with your own, openly and positively. Sustaining appropriate behaviour in role requires self-discipline, clear thinking, and careful boundary keeping, especially where roles potentially conflict. The job can involve juggling the roles of a parent in the school/ school governor/ chaplain to the school/ Village vicar — all at the same time.
6. Leading volunteer teams in a voluntary organisation —
   sometimes (especially in a rural multiparish benefice), teams have conflicting and unclear traditions and aims. Local feelings and rivalries can run deep. Your job is to try and provide a focus for unity in the community. Word goes around villages. People are very interested in their vicars — this unlocks high levels of interest and personal support on occasion, especially when the relational infrastructure is there to support the person in their ministry, but can be experienced as oppressive.

Being a rural multiparish incumbent has many dimensions, and that is one of the satisfactions people derive from doing the job. Although no clergy person is perfect, they need to find an approach to their work and the people they serve that is good enough to sustain their sense of personal and professional wellbeing. If this is compromised, the whole structure of deference that used to surround clergy is no longer there, and they can easily find themselves in a lonely, frightening and even dangerous working environment. The occupation requires a high degree of personal self-knowledge, resilience and versatility, or it can turn into a nightmare.

Bullying: diagnostics (provisional)

Putting a finger on the problem. Since our discussion earlier this year about clergy bullying (sometimes of, sometimes by), I have been trying to work out how I, as a bishop, can respond operationally. What are I and my colleagues supposed to seek? What defines what’s going on? As a working toolbox, about which I would love further correction and enlightenment, examine four I’s?

1. Information. Most methods for protecting vulnerable people involve secure protocols about communicating information out of the war zone into places it can be processed and acted upon, like Childline. Entirely protected anonymous squawk procedures are necessary but wide open to abuse. The only way to protect against abuse of the reporting system is to make the open protected communication easily available, but have rigorous protocols about weighing information. Assume nothing; believe everything initially, but test it carefully. Check the infromation on which you act is evidence and possible (ultimately) to put in a form which natural justice requires vis-a-vis everyone involved, including (eventually) the alleged perpetrator. The more reporters take responsibility for their feelings, the further we are from the danger that all we are getting is one half of a scenario within which both sides are actually exhibiting traits of bullying behaviour towards each other.
   
   
2. Insecurity. What goes on in bullies? Why do they do it? Fear and personal insecurity have to be in there somewhere, surely. These will probably be evidenced in other areas of life that have nothing to do with the victim, as well as in the bullying behaviour — “probably” not “necessarily,” as the temporary relief provided by victimizing a vulnerable person may act as a lightning conductor and diminish symptoms of fear and insecurity elsewhere.
   
   
3. Insincerity. One personal trait that will pretty much always express itself in bullying behaviour is a (technically) psychopathic personality. The technical term “psychopathic personality” is unhelpful because of its loaded popular associations. All I mean (from prison experience) is a person who would score high on a Hare PCL-R test. Signs include a strong selection of these traits:
   
   a. People who may have many faults, but ever being wrong ain’t one of them: superficial, sometimes grandiose
   
   b. ...with an immense capacity to charm but also to manipulate — deceitful; economical with the truth
   
   c. ...where everything that happens to them is all about them, because they have a weak capacity to empathise with or even accept others are autonomous individuals, let alone feel accountability towards them
   
   d. ...where everything that goes wrong is someone else’s fault, ammo for blame, and everything that goes right is focussed on themselves and used to vindicate themselves in the face of a hostile or uncomprehending world; prone to blame the ref for the goals they let in,
   
   e. ... with a tendency to “them and us” thinking, to demonise perceived opponents and glamorize perceived allies, arising from a low-accountability world view in which I can only ever win if you lose
   
   f. ... bigger about threats and boasting than results and delivery
   
   g. ...with a preference for passive aggression and revenge as a dish taken cold. Watch out for grudges.
   
   I would expect some if not all of these traits to be evidenced in a true bully, pretty much every time.
   
   
4. Intentions. There are two sides to victimizing — victimizing others and victimizing oneself. We can’t play the one off against the other, and everybody remains responsible for their intentnions and actions, but anyone assessing what is going on has to make the distinction in their own mind.
   

Clergy bullying: Trouble at Mill?

I can’t comment on the Mark Sharpe case, currently in progress, in another diocese, but the Church Times and Thinking Anglicans have commented on harrassment, working conditions and employment rights of the clergy — issues somebody suggested to me the other day are something of my pet subject. The union says:

Should Revd. Sharpe’s case be upheld after any appeal, it will mean that ministers across the UK will be subject to legislation covering: health & safety, the national minimum wage, paid holidays, ‘whistle-blowing’, anti-discrimination, paid holidays, family-friendly flexible working policies, the working time directive, and unlawful deduction of wages

I can understand the union dramatizing, but Philip Petchey’s article in the Ecclesiastical Law Journal 33 (not free online but you can buy it here) gives a much more sober, accurate account of how employment law has viewed ministers of religion since Victorian times and why, as well as where we really are now.

It’s been a rapidly evolving field for clergy, like everybody else, but current legislation will mean that, in principle, clergy will soon have terms and conditions that largely reflect the general workplace. It’s important to remember that as well as giving rights, this legislation also lays on clergy newly explicit responsibilities about capability and accountablility which most clergy traditionally discharged in our own, characteristically less explicit and formal, ways.

As a clergyman for the past 29 years, including almost 5 as a bishop, I rather work on the basis that as far as possible, church ministers should have at least as good working rights and responsibilities as everyone else — preferably better.
“As far as possible” because we clergy have extra freedoms, vulnerabilities and burdens that arise from the fact that we ourselves, as well as the church and the public, see our calling as a way of life more than a nine to five job. Some of our best satisfactions, as well as worst frustrations come from this simple fact.

We often work from home in a voluntary organisation within a broader community that can bless or curse us, sometimes both at once. Many expectations are implicit. This doesn’t justify abuse, but it inevitably means a far more complex and subtle working context than simple industrial or commercial workplaces. We do have enormous freedom about our hours and lines of approach to our work, but most of us care very much about our calling and tend to overwork. Most of the difficulties we experience arise from vicious circles driven by dysfunctional relationships, rather than simple operational or logistical failures. The clergy workforce is so radically “flat” and dispersed that we have had to take more responsibility for our own work than in more bureacratically supervised professions. There just isn’t a large HR department, although some would say it’s on its way.

The Union statement helpfully draws attention to 2 other big issues:

Health and Safety is a complex and fast evolving field of its own. In basic ways legislation aready applies, but as with all small (sub 5) workplaces, in patchy and variable ways which have to be constantly reviewed locally. H&S is a complex and rapidly evolving field, some even say industry, of its own. Historically, clergy have often scored very high in job satisfaction surveys, but many of us find the increasing bureaucratization of their working practice in this and other areas a genuine stress inducer.

Minimum Wage, family flexibility and working time — because clergy working time is largely deployed at our own discretion (apart perhaps from Sunday service times), the story here is theoretically perfectly clear. This doesn’t mean things always work out ideally. Clergy are not hourly paid, so I can’t really see paid holidays and unlawful deductions as issues for us.

I am most interested in two other HR issues:

1. Whistle-blowing
   Here practice is variable. The positive is that the strong but minimal legal framework within which the Church operates does confer basic protection all round. Historically, the beneficed majority of clergy have held one of the safest jobs in the country. The force of new legislation will, rightly, extend similar protection to their colleagues. The negative is that subtle implicit workplaces with high community engagement (like the police, health and social services) are the hardest places to identify and correct subtle and coded abuse.
   
2. Anti-Dscrimination
   This touches a murky area of human nature where if we are not intentionally working towards a solution, we are part of the problem. I believe that the best way to secure the end of disability, gender and other forms of discrimination is to grow a positive and itentional diversity policy among ourselves. Awareness is the key, and the only way to make real progress is to follow compliance procedures across the whole range of operations doggedly over many years. I don’t believe this is about being dragged kicking and screaming into compliance by outside law. Rather, Jesus teaches us that God is bringing in a kingdom founded on justice, where every race, people, kindred, contribute their particularity to a glorious whole which we are called to realise insofar as in us lies, now. Therefore a discriminatory church which isn’t trying to do anything about being discriminatory is a lousy church. Therefore, our diocesan committee for racial justice is working out what we call a rigorous diversity agenda for our diocese, based on the Wood-Sheppard principles for race equality...