Beware the Words of Weasels

A rather fun conversation before lunch involved trying to explain various senses of the term “orthodox” which is beginning to do the rounds of some quarters of the communion. Properly, of course, it refers to the Holy Orthodox Churches, whose agreed designation it has been since the 11th Century at least. Now it’s beginning to be used with a slight curl of the upper lip as a badge of rigid right wing conformity to type.

With all such terms, even “Christian” or “Methodist,” you have to ask “who says you’re / they’re one of those?” If the only answer is, “I do, along with my close compadres,” you can be pretty sure you're being sold a pup. Similarly there are words like “revisionist” which seem to play the same role in right wing parlance that “fundamentalist” does in left wing banter. You can pretty much bet your bottom dollar that they are merely hostile name-calling, no more. If you hear them used, you can just ask the person using them to put their brain into gear and try and articulate what or who they really mean, and on what basis.

The only way to stay sane and be courteous is to pass a rigid self-denying ordinance that “I will only use of other people designations they use of themselves.” This could helpfully be supplemented by a simple Bart Simpson Blackboard resolution: “I will not hi-jack other people’s labels to spite my enemies.” If all that came out of this Lambeth were a few people resolving along these lines, that would be grief to the weasels, and joy to the world.

Clergy Bullying 102

Valuable personal time yesterday exploring the issues around Bullying in the Church with Anne Lee, social psychologist from Oxford University, who has written and is working on it. There are interesting resources out there, and those of us at the coalface need to develop stronger definitions and models to support better working practice. The Church is meant to be a delivery system for freedom and wholeness. This issue strikes at the heart of what we are about.

1. When a group of human beings interact there is a scale of behaviour between pacific and agressive, and somewhere along that line lies a personal and social acceptability marker. Any context involving the use of power raises the stakes radically. Violence and the Sacred are always interesting bedfellows, especially in bourgeois, implicit cultures. Religious contexts easily become toxic and dangerous when people kid themselves they don’t have power. Back in the 90’s when I was helping lead workshops for training incumbents I met someone whose colleagues were utterly terrified of him. He thought because he was a vicar he didn’t have any power, so there wasn't a problem. When you talked to his colleagues, what spooked them was his inconsistency. He was terribly informal and chummy 99% of the time, with occasional completely unpredictable flashes of rage which humiliated and terrified his colleagues, for which he never took responsibility, but tried to smooth over by being chummy again. It was the classic pattern of the Young Offender who beats his girlfriend up on Friday night and buys her a dozen red roses and a box of chocs on Saturday morning. Responsibility needs to be taken for the exercise of power and authority. Just because many professional guardians of the sacred feel powerless, it doesn’t mean they are!
2. The meaning of our behaviours has to be discerned from who we are in context, but they also create the context in which we act next. The more extreme behaviour becomes, the more it can be seen as a problem and clinicalised. Everyone has repetetive patterns of response we call “Personality” that seem almost absolute, but, paradoxically, people have far greater capacity than the patterns indicate to reinvent themselves in different contexts. How do we measure behaviour in context? What are the routes to personal reinvention, and how do we take them? We all have it in us to assert ourselves inappropriately. Only with agreed norms does it become possible to say where lines have been crossed. That’s where basic rules of procedure and natural justice defend the less assertive against the more assertive, People always need to be listened to and perceived problems dealt with on an evidential basis. That only catches the tip of the iceberg, however, in the same way that whatever we do to try and raise conviction rates for rape and domestic violence, they remain shockingly low. More than blame and breast-beating, we need to promote actively cultures of dignity and mutual respect. How? Let’s begin with the Church of England’s new formal guidelines, to be published in June. The English gentleman amateur thing helps prevent senior staff and others seeking professional help about this, as about other workplace issues. Rigorous training to sharpen personal awareness and skills, like the Integrative Complexity course I have been doing this year, needs to become the norm.
   
3. This whole problem is part of a larger world of stress. For me the guv’nor on this subject remains, even after six years, Affirmation and Accountability. This was produced a few years ago by the Society of Mary and Martha, which helps decompress clergy and church workers. A&A is based on their experiences of the negative forces that bear down on working vicars. We studied it extensively in the diocese when it came out, and I believe it has yet to be bettered as a practical manual for establihsing wellbeing in the UK context. As well as following up the academic leads Anne gave me, that’s where I’m going next, to see how I think we’re getting on practically with the agenda I embraced theoretically as an area dean in 2002 — am I doing it as a bishop? how does it stack up against the new guidelines, coming out in June? Watch this space...
   

Conflict Transformation, Day Three

Conflict Transformation Course, Day Three (Earlier Day One, here and here, Day Two here.) This bagged up information from the other two, with a chance to rework the medical ethics problem from day 1 in the light of all we'd learnt about Integrative Complexity and Relational Contextual Reasoning. I came to the same conclusion, but was rather surprised by how many extra facets about the problem and its various contexts came into play when I applied the IC/ RCR toolboxes. We were each given a personal profile describing how we react to conflict, based on the work we'd handed in. I wish I’d studied this stuff years ago. I don’t think it would have lessened the amount of conflict in my life, but it would have felt more like White Water rafting, and less like falling over Niagara Falls!

Finally, a lot of the course so far rather assumed rational people acting rationally. Whether it's an angry person somewhere under the ceiling, or a sullen manipulative bully, not everybody is sensible all the time. Some people and groups make a living out of being difficult. What about them?

We were introduced to a bit of Game Theory (Robert Axelrod) called, rather unattractively, “Tit for Tat” indicating tactical options in relation to a variably collaborative or defecting protagonist which might be able to get things back on some sort of negotiable track in the face of person or persons behaving badly.

I think this project offered considerable potential for church conflict at all levels. Here's a classic statistic out of the air — 46% of church conflict is more driven by the personal dynamics than the actual bone of contention. We need to grow greater understanding about how we interact and why, along with some practical skills for alternative strategies and tactics. I’m certainly exploring how we might be able to access this resource better in the diocese and wider church. It will be interesting to walk towards Lambeth with this perspective in mind.

Peacemaking Boot Camp 2

Transforming Conflict Session Two (One, here and here). The plot thickens. On the train there, I got out some Integrative Complexity homework I’d done, and suddenly saw another way of mapping the second phase of it, leading to an actual (low wattage ecological) light bulb moment. During the day it got more complicated, and our group is now going to try our hand at working a homework problem with RCR, an 8-phase method which incorporates but transcends IC. Hmm...

These methods certainly provide effective, practical ways to slow down the reptile fight-or-flight bits of the brain whilst the intelligent bit catches up. That’s got to be worth knowing how to do, even more than waggling your ears.Their Achilles Bugbear could be that whilst proven peacemaking techniques infallibly help people who actually want to make peace, they only annoy small-minded thugs who derive their energy from getting into punchups, and stave off their terror of insignificance by terrorizing others. Or do they? More will be revealed in workshop 3, which I'm booked into on 26 February.

Don’t make a Drama out of a Crisis

People have been asking me all about last Friday, the first of my 3 days as a guinea pig on a research project about Integrative Complexity. It’s resourced by theologically literate Cambridge research psychologists. What did I learn, and what is Integrative Complexity anyway?

1. You measure IC by language — not what’s said, but how it’s said. It’s a psychological discipline, grounded in our understanding of the functions of different brain parts, and with a big experimental base. People studying Osama’s IC level (as you do) noticed it hit the floor just before 9/11.
   
2. People Integrate Complexity, when they hold the whole picture = all the particular information in a diverse field simultaneously. Telescoping things into simple yes/no’s, Not relating them, or eliminating them are strategies for avoiding rather than integrating complexity. If you can hold things in view for what they actually are in their own terms, you achieve higher integration. The higher your integrated complexity level, the higher your capacity to understand, and the less likely you are to end up punching people's lights out.
3. OK, Wittgenstein fans! Remember those Duck/rabbits? being realistic about what you see and not telescoping one into the other whilst remaining aware of both possibilities, demands a higher level of IC than the ‘be right and persist’ approach.
4. Hi-IC isn’t always the best way. Some situations call for it and others don’t. Before World War 2, for example Hitler’s low IC posturing required Churchill’s low IC, not Neville Chamberlain’s high IC response. We studied a five-phase model of how people evolve tension into full scale wars, along with tell-tale signs of transition between stages. We also worked through other case studies, using an IC toolbox.
   

Violence flares from low to obscenely high in ways that can be described in almost any context. This study is all about how religious leaders use and could use IC awareness in leadership. Different approaches to faith and leadership profile differently in IC terms. This study is finding out how.

Why bother? Scripture tells Christian leaders to accept the prospect of conflict, but to aim for peace and steer away strenuously from fruitless punch-ups. I want to learn how. I am particularly interested, having written a thesis on religious conflict in the Church of England between 1880-1914. I’m furiously scribbling questionaires, writing up notes, and looking forward to stage 2 next year. Watch this space...