How to Change Your Vicar (Part Two)

Clergy have all kinds of unusual talents. Vicars have managed to combine ministry with keeping bees, woodcarving, climbing the Himalayas, even inventing submarine detection equipment.

Some clergy have Really Useful collateral skills — playing the guitar, journalism, fundraising, stage magic for school assemblies.

Second Last Thing
My second piece of advice is for people who believe there may be a capability issue with their vicar. For this to go anywhere formally, it should normally relate to what incumbents are actually there to do. A hymn writing, guitar playing or beekeeping fail is bad news. But it’s unlikely to support capability proceedings.

What are parish clergy actually there to do? What fails really count? The answer lies in Canon C24 of the Church of England. Such is the variety of circumstances in which clergy work that these norms are indicative, taken in context, not exhaustive and literally applied. Bear in mind that nobody scores 100% in any or all areas, but these are their core functions.

1. Prayer
   Maintaining a pattern of prayer in the parish, traditionally understood as drawn from the Daily Office — the prayers of the whole Church provided for in Prayer Book and Common Worship.
2. Celebration of Holy Communion
   They should provide for the regular celebration of Holy Communion, especially on Sundays and Holy Days.
3. Preach
   Clergy should provide for regular preaching in the Churches for which they are responsible.
4. Teach
   Clergy should teach, both adults and children, being willing to visit schools when invited
5. Present candidates for Confirmation
   having prepared them for discipleship within the life of the Church.
6. Visit
   both the sick and housebound, and make themselves available for spiritual counsel and advice.
7. Consult with a Parochial Church Council
   about matters of general concern and importance to the parish. This should meet at least four times a year.
8. Arrange substitutes
   when unable to perform their basic duties themselves

You might react to this list in various ways — where are the targets? Where are Performance Indicators? You may indeed see praying, leading Sacraments, preaching and teaching as less than vital functions for the Church compared to other things. Yet these are still the primary activities clergy are there to enable in the Parish. Why no KPI’s? Well one reason is that clergy do have tremendous liberty to approach these tasks according to conscience and personal conviction. Imposing on the consciences of clergy is likely to induce more losses than gains. The breadth of the working space clergy have is not always ideally used. The besetting sin of clergy, however, is far more often overwork than laziness.

So, secondly...
If you are thinking of Capability, relate your concerns to what Vicars are actually there to do.

How to Change Your Vicar (Part One)

Not quite Jack Lemmon’s problem, but parish life feels like that sometimes. Just as in marriages, all of us need to remember we are all limited in various ways, and need each other to stay grounded and sane, but don’t always realise how much.

Lord Runcie, when Bishop of St Albans, once stopped in a village to congratulate the butcher, as one pig man to another, on a superb carcase hanging outside.

“You can have it,” quoth the latter, “if you get rid of our Vicar!”

About four or five times a year somebody comes to see me wondering if that is where they are with their vicar. I have got into the way of suggesting a list of Four Last Things to remember before consigning an apparently unsatsfactory vicar  to the Dustbin of History. Remembering these helps you achieve something worthwhile for everybody, and, I hope, prevents the Sermon on the Mount flying out the window early on.

First Last Thing
Everybody has rights and responsibilities equally, and needs to work out in their own mind what kind of a problem this really is. This is a very useful discipline because the sensible thing to do will depend directly on which of the following five options you believe best describes what is going on:

1. Is the vicar doing something seriously, measurably, wrong?
   I don’t mean everyday common or garden workaday faults of omission or commission, however annoying, but something serious that would in any other sphere of work get somebody sacked?
   If so, the Clergy Discipline Measure is the way to go. It is a major legal procedure because it can potentially deprive someone of the work and home, but sometimes it is the right tool.
2. Is the vicar not up to the job?
   If somebody tells you they are up to the job of being a parish priest, they are a fool or a liar. But is there some major and necessary area of work in which they continually fall short? To give na example, not being terribly good at chairing meetings is an occupational hazard fr many vicars. But not holding more than 4 PCC meetings a year, or failing to conduct an APCM, is a problem. By the same token some sermons are better than others, but failure to show up in Church or ever preach could be evidence of incapacity.
   If so, there are formal procedures that cover what HR people call “capability”, depending on the terms of your vicar's work (Common Tenure or Freehold). The first stage is to log the critical incidents involved fairly and accurately, bearing in mind that they could be required for tribunal proceedings.
3. Is this really all about relationships?
   It usually is. It is a truth generally acknowledged in every field of human endeavor, but especially in one in which sensitivities are raised as they are in religion, that not everybody can work fruitfully with everybody else. This is acutely uncomfortable, but as long as people are honest about it, there’s no shame in acknowledging the fact. By dint of personality some vicars are more able to making and sustaining relationships than others — many spiritually minded people are introverts, and it is not given to every vicar to be a Butlin’s Redcoat. Others are extraverts, and may seem brash and rude. Many vicars’ first reactions to having a fault pointed out is to blame theselves, whilst others “have many faults, but being wrong isn’t one of them.”
   If so, we maintain a network of conciliators trained by Bridgebuilders. They and others can offer their services. But beware. In mediation what you really want is usually what you end up stuck with. No mediator can magic a situation better unless people actually want to be reconciled.
4. What capacity does the whole system of the parish have to transact its business?
   Like families, parishes have different capacities to get along. This isn’t either surprising or insoluble. In fact the vast majority of the skills needed in this area are trainable. Are there repeating patterns in recent history? Is there a feeling of “something in the water?” To what extent is your vicar (or someone else) a lightning conductor for the feelings of others? Or not? the key diagnostic feature is bad communication, I find.
   If so, we have a Parish Development Adviser and other consultants who can observe and then help people be more aware of the snags and opportunities of life and work together and, even more importantly, help them to deliver on their good intentions.
5. Is the problem just one of those things?
   before I am buried under a hail of “you just don’t understand,” this does happen. It happens in medical diagnostics, it happens with the ministry of deliverance, it happens all over. It’s what happens when the computer helpline tells you to unplug the machine, count to five and plug it in again. People, vicars as well as lay volunteers can flourish in some positions and not in others and even, on occasion reinvent themselves. But to do so they need honest feedback, clear communication, and confidence in God, their calling and themselves. Backing them into a corner and beating them with rubber hoses may make some people feel better, but it rarely achieves anything in the greater scheme of things and sometimes rubs the ash into the carpet something wicked.
   If so, don’t make a drama out of a crisis. Many of our parishes survived the black death, so this is probably a passing cloud by comparison. Assess the strengths of everyone in the situation giving rise to concern, and see if you can think of a way they could bring out the best not the worst in each other. With some idea of that we will know how to deploy Psychotherapists, CBT counsellors, Team consultants, Work coaches, the whole gang.

So, First and Foremost...
Work out what kind of problem the evidence indicates this actually is!

Rev: Faith, hope and charity

Adam Smallbone, the new BBC Rev., is engaging, with real spiritual depth. At last the BBC has moved beyond The Vicar of Dibley. She engaged millions with woolly jumpers and chocolate silliness, with a good humoured take on life, the Universe and everything. Rev. is engaging in a very different way, much closer to where many urban vicars are, in fact.
People talk of the Church of England as an institution, forgetting it isn’t anything of the sort — just a ragbag of around 20,000 trusts and bodies, loosely aligned, that has evolved over the past 1600 years. Its ties bind in all kinds of intriguing elasticated ways. Describing life in such a place is no light task.

It’s easy for any outsider to critique the detail of any TV depiction of anything. Years ago the BBC broadcast Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance. Next Day a retired military gentleman complained that “the Buffs in fact had seven buttons down their tunics not nine as portrayed by the BBC last night.” As any ful kno. This kind of complaint is rarely as clever as it seems to the person who makes it. We all know that few Archdeacons cruise round London in Taxis wearing Gestapo surplus leather gloves, but that’s not the point. The point is that’s how it feels.

On a personal and emotional level, Rev: is remarkably sure-footed. It brings back vividly for me memories of ten years’ urban ministry — trying to be a Christian and pray, feeling rather bemused often, filling the diary, trying to love people in the face of my own inadequacy, the size of the task, and the vagaries of human nature. Rev: has a clutch of improbable vicarage characters I could match almost name for name, as, I suspect, could anyone who’s ever been an urban vicar for any reasonable length of time.

For all its tendency to self-parody and caricature, I like Rev. It’s a noble enterprise. Those who wrote it know whereof they speak. Adam sits in his Church trying to pray the office, wishing God would bloody do something, but secretly suspecting he won’t until his unworthy servant has made it through the next funeral. It’s a ministry that resents all the distractions, until it realises that the ministry is the distractions.

There’s holiness in the unglamorous, haphazard, but profoundly kind and patient way C of E vicars do urban ministry, even in some of the crazier characters vicars encounter. It’s highly implicit, always understated, rarely obvious. Light very occasionally streams in serendipitously, but the grind is always there. You just have to pray for people, and try to help them make the best of themselves, and never give up.

There is, actually, courage, resilience, faith and even holiness wrapped up far more than thousands of urban vicars will ever know in their ministries. It deserves more understanding and respect than it sometimes gets, and this show does acknowledge its reality and worth. For all Rev:’s occasional TV simplification, full marks to writers, cast and crew for trying to capture it, and occasionally succeeding.

PS: I studied in Shoreditch thirty years ago. St Leonard’s was an amazing place, and it’s good of the telly people to give the old dump its own TV show.

Ministry: Rudiments of Wisdom

30 years ordained this year, and someone asked me what I thought I’d learnt. That conversation gave birth to a few stray thoughts on the back of an envelope. It would be rather grand to call them laws of Vicaring, but here goes (in no particular order of importance):

1. If someone says Jesus has healed their wooden leg, rejoice, but be sure to kick them in the shins first, just to make sure.
   
   
2. If you get away with it and it works, fine. If it doesn’t and they catch you, just cough up cheerfully and enjoy all the times you got away with it
   
   
3. Do the job you’re doing now with all your heart, not the one you used to do in your last parish, or hope to do in your next. Time flies when you’re having fun...
   
   
4. Don't ask until you’ve worked out the question. Only ask people questions they are likely to answer in the way you want. Also, Don't ask when the baby is due until the new lady in Church has actually told you she is pregnant. Never ask a Lawyer “Can we do this?” The question is always “How can we do this?”
   
   
5. Pick up the bloody phone! (This applies to outgoing as well as incoming calls)
   
   
6. You do not have their P45's in your back pocket, so always explain, always apologise
   
   
7. Make the other lot line up with their own rulebook, and have a go at doing so yourself before you propose change
   
   
8. Be extremely loyal to your predecessors. They are your most powerful secret weapon, along with people who pray quietly at home.
   
   
9. Schedule your free time as zealously as you would a funeral. Your family are the closest members of the body of Christ. Strive not to be toxic to them, and remember they didn't ask to have you for a parent.
   
   
10. Beware Grand Designs, especially your own. Dolus latet in generalibus — the Devil's in the detail, along with the delight...
    
    
11. You can't argue with whining, but you can with anger. Damaged, angry people have their own reward. Bless ’em all.
    
    
12. Rigid faith is often brittle. In the Kingdom the first often come last and the last first. You are not God's minders, or managers, but guides who should strive to be reliable and trustworthy (I Corinthians 4)
    
    
13. You inherited far more than you realise. Before you go buy a new tool, check the old toolbox you seldom use and nine times out of ten you've already got one. Revolution by tradition!
    
    
14. All constructive change works from the inside out — “You can sleep in the Garage, but it don't make you an automobile” (Billy Graham?)
    
    
15. This job is about the how and why of people’s lives, including your own. You accomlish for more long term than you think, and far less in the here and now: “I think I've far exceeded what I ever thought I could possibly do. I'm almost shocked that I'm still around after all these years . . . and always grateful that I get another turn to do something.” (Billy Crystal)
    
    
16. “The Church doesn’t need new members half as much as it needs the old lot making over.” (Billy Sunday)

That’s enough Billies for now. I’m sure everyone has discovered their own rules — the floor is yours!

PS the rather wonderful window is in Aston Sandford, and shows two Churches, Aston Sandford on the Left and Thame on the Right. More about Aston Sandford another time, but my thanks to those who hosted a wonderful Sunday morning together last week, including lunch together. Above all, thanks for all you do the rest of the time...

Get real! Kill George Herbert!

At home I have a groaning shelf of books published since 1900 about ministry in the Church of England. Justin Lewis-Anthony’s If you meet George Herbert on the Road, Kill Him is the latest and, no mean feat, by far the best. The trouble with “how-to” books about ministry is that they can easily become part of an oppressive structure that keys into a significant vulnerability in sincere ministers. You woke up this morning with 25 things you hadn't done, and felt vaguely guilty about. You read the how-to book, and now you’ve got 35. Could be time to stick your head in a gas oven. Indulging in the wrong kind of how-to stuff, spiced with paperback Evangelical fisherman’s tales by the Successful, does not make you the best priest in the street (shades of the Father Ted “Golden Cleric”) but a nervous wreck. Its nursery slopes are the way to slow death — what some do call burn-out.

Justin’s excellent book does not play this how-to game, although it does end up talking Turkey, with excellent alternative strategies and tactics to help lower spiritual and personal blood pressure, and bring a Kill-George-Herbert priest back from the Church of the Planet Zog into the Church of England.

Justin’s thesis is that we in the C of E have indulged in harmful romanticism about ministry, focussed around a gentle bucolic fantasy about the ministry of George Herbert. Roman Catholic friends tell me of a similar phenomenon in their tradition about the Curé d’Ars. This ecumenical dimension, as well as a certain Cambridge historian’s reluctance to use any “-ism” except baptism, made me judder a bit over terms like “Herbertism” but the term does clarify the discussion and provides a tool to enable us to continue to enjoy Herbert’s sublime poetry without being sucked into a lot of crushing sentimentality and hype about his three year ministry as a parish priest in the seventeenth century, in a parish of under 500, with two curates to do the dirty work.

Back in the late eighties, when I was an urban vicar, I almost had a breakdown through the unsustainable and unrealistic expectations I was putting on myself. I can see it now, but it brought its own tunnel vision at the time. As well as lifebelts from spiritual advisers, teachers and friends, I read Bonhoeffer, then Vincent Donovan, then Martin Thornton, then Rowan Williams, then Sara Savage, as healing and hope gradually dawned. The analytical sections of this book reprised almost exactly the path I found towards recovery. Dame Edna would call it spooky. If I’d been able to read this book years ago it would have saved me a lot of trouble. Therefore I commend this book 110%.

The combination of high fantasy and self-expectations, an apparent duty to say yes to everybody all the time, a one-man-band mentality about ministry, historical romanticism and exhaustion almost got me. Care Bears who attenuate everything else about their lives get crocked. I don’t now mind admitting it, and the more we all admitted our need to be needed, got some boundaries in and stood up to our own fantasies and the cult of nice, the more we could all begin to be half the people God made us to be, as priests and ministers of the gospel.

This book is a vastly intelligent, compassionate, understanding and helpful resource. Some will find it a bit clever, so if you prefer your books stupid, you may be disappointed. Of course, if the cap does not fit you don’t have to wear it. It does fit many of us. The fact is that almost all of us vicars have been on this game for far too long. It has done us no favours. As crocked care bears we may even have sought a way off the not-so-merry-go-round. This book offers the most cogent escape route I know, historically and theologically, as well as practically. Take it, and get a life!

One (Traditionalist) Road to Recovery

Tim Chesterton bears moving testimony to the ministry of Bishop Ron Ferris, formerly of the North Canadian Yukon diocese, then Algoma. In retirement he has left the Anglican Church of Canada for one of the Canadian Traditionalist networks. I can’t / won’t comment about his choice, not knowing its immediate context; This post is not about his retirement ministry, but what preceded it. Bishop Ron was an early adopter of the internet to stay in touch and guide clergy, and used to post brief weekly notes and ideas, which I came across a few years ago, and thought were solid gold.
I hope they stay somewhere on the web, even though the author has retired...

One of these concerns conflicted Christian communities. Like an immune system attacking its healthy body, Church groups can become oppressed by a soul-sickness that reveals itself in paranoia, bullying, silly (usually ad hominem) touchiness and sick bunny sarcasm. Here is Bishop Ron’s list of characteristic symptoms and treatments...

1. High and habitual anxiety and reactivity which overshadows perspective, opportunity, and differentiated thought.

Remedy: Meet enough security needs to allow calm dialogue and thought. Stabilize the patient.

2. Carefully tended list of grievances is held and recited to negotiate future concessions.

Remedy: Acknowledge and air wounds. Apply reality therapy to exaggerations.

3. Enduring personal animosities override all decisions, all deliberations, all impartiality.

Remedy: Slowly renew, dilute, and broaden the leadership base.

4. Blaming and cyclical, unhealthy relationship patterns will be present and gain strength from anger, revenge, stigmatization, "them and us" thinking, and distancing "ain't it awful".

Remedy: Re-state the problems without personal blame. Envision a new future. Don't be vague.

5. Conflict is magnified through indirect communications such as one person speaking for anonymous others.

Remedy: Create a fair forum for direct communication where people speak for themselves, directly to the whole group, and where the open decisions matter.

6. Hostage taking occurs "unless . . . l'm leaving".

Remedy: "We love you, appreciate what you've done, and don't want you to leave, however . . . "

7. Relationship obsessions abound with unhealthy clinging or distancing. This may lead to endless analysis, therapy, inward scrutiny, and desperate solutions.

Remedy: Focus on the great outward common tasks and purposes.

8. An exhausted few tenuously cling to the wheel as the ship tosses and lunges largely out of control.

Remedy: Leaders must priorize, set boundaries, differentiate tasks, and proceed with faith in God and their own integrity. Reduce the tasks to match the resources and create the space for some enjoyment.

9. Insecurity reactions around books, buildings, the old days, and the past hero will be sentimentalized. People will cling to each other in unhealthy ways: gossip circles, power groups, guard-dog teams, and "ain't it awful" observation teams.

Remedy: Help the community find its security in their primary convictions; God, Christ, the word, the mission, and the love.

10. Often there is a sense of morass and abyss. Poverty thinking will overcome abundance thinking. "We're hurting. We're stuck. We're getting to like our insecurities. We're poor and that insures nothing good can happen. Even if we could change the cost might be too high."

Remedy: A new climate, new patterns of relating, abundance thinking, hope kindled

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...
   

Clergy HR: Eat your shorts, B P Richfield

We use Claire Pedrick of 3-D Coaching, regularly and increasingly, to help and counsel clergy with a variety of professional developmental needs. I met Claire yesterday, among other things, to scope some generic trends affecting clergy welfare, including the impact of new diversity and equality legislation next year.

As laid out by Harriet Harman there are four threads to a bill for the next session of parliament. The current complex raft of equality and diversity legislation (107 statutes, I’m told) is insanely spread out, and driven entirely by giving individuals rights which they are not always willing or able to enforce. The government’s thinking is that this is a systemic problem, and calls for a systemic solution. They intend to pull things together and take positive action in four areas, rather than simply relying on employment tribunals:

1. Greater Transparency
2. Enforcement
3. Public procurement
4. Preventative systemic action — training etc.

This sounds really good, though the devil is always in the detail. There is, of course, work to do about genuine occupational requirements — ensuring the Pope’s a Catholic, and you don’t get The Deerhunter as director of Greenpeace. I don’t imagine it’s beyond human wit to work that stuff out. For common or garden purposes, I see this as a really positive way forward for everyone. As work continues on our own Committee for Racial Justice (which I chair) on developing our own rigorous diversity agenda, to turn it from a motherhood-and-apple-pie aspiration into a way of life based on Biblical and Moral values, I can see benefits in all four of these areas.

Just spare a thought for poor old B. P Richfield. Dinosaurs ran for a few years in the early nineties until Disney inexplicably pulled the plug on what was, IMHO, the best TV they ever did. B. P. Richfield was the ultimate boss from hell, a Palaeolithic Alan Sugar, CEO of the Wesayso Corporation. B. P. ran on high octane Theory-X, and was, of course, the first great mentor and management guru of a generation of bishops. Here’s the kind of workplace encounter he used to initiate:

B.P. Richfield:	SINCLAIR!. I oughta kill you and your whole family, but I'd probably get in trouble with the union. As it is, there's only one thing I can do to you: you're fired, Sinclair, fired, fired, FIRED!!!.
Earl:	Fired? That means I don't have to come to work anymore. Oh, this is the happiest day of my life.

I was delighted to come across evidence, however, that even BP had mellow moments, especially after chewing the Happy Plant:

Emotional roots of bad ministry

The way things work out for good or for bad is as about far more than the quality of the people we recruit. Quality of work is a matter of attitude and feelings as much as capacity. People perform very differently according to context. With a very complex, subtle and personal job, people who fall below par are often unhappy. One enemy of high performance is the puritanical “you’re not here to enjoy yourselves” flog-it kind of mentality some people have about their ministry. It leads them to ignore feedback and reinforces emotional unintelligence about themselves and everybody else. It doesn’t mean vicars have to be happy all the time. Some people can only write poetry if they’re unhappy. It’s the not being aware of emotions, theirs and other people’s, that’s a bigger problem than any particular emotional state. Self awareness is a big requirement of this job.

When things do go wrong, the Bloody Fool theory is never enough. It seems to explain everything; in fact it explains nothing that really matters. It’s all very well pointing out people’s faults to them. But from where are they going to get the energy to act differently in future? Without considering that, at least as carefully as the simple story of what’s gone wrong, nothing is going improve. Blame cultures can actually cause the underperformance of which they complain. Kicking-the-cat behaviour of all kinds is actually a vile but understandable cry for help; whether the cat is the vicar or the congregation.

And when things have gone wrong, people are fantastically adaptive if they have the spiritual rootedness, motivation, capacity to receive feedback and self knowledge to be. If, however they’re out of touch with their own sources of spiritual and personal energy, the wheels are far more likely to come off the wagon.