Persecution, Paranoia and Pluralism for Pot-Plants

Holy Saturday brings what the Daily Mail calls an Astonishing attack on the Prime Minister by Lord Carey. I was not astonished. The timing is plainly the Daily Mail’s, to embarrass the government as much as possible. Apparently two thirds of Christians now feel they are a persecuted minority — or at least they did fifteen months ago when the fieldwork for this survey was conducted.

Since almost 60% of the population self-identified as Christians in the 2011 census, it's hard to see how the basic maths of this notion could possibly be substantiated. There are Christians in some parts of Africa and the Muslim world, for example, who actually do experience persecution. This does not consist of some politicians, including Christian politicians, disagreeing with them, but losing jobs, homes and freedom. Any comparison with them seems, to put it mildly, tacky.

Apparently UK persecution consists of having to tolerate the fact that many people don’t share their narrow interpretation of the Bible, including many if not most other Christians.

So what basis could there be for the factually tendentious feeling that Christians are persecuted in the UK? Perhaps top-shelf reactionary religion, in itself, can engender its own nightmares. I turned to the memoirs of Frank Schaeffer, talking about the anxieties of his Fundamentalist childhood:

We Schaeffers never compromised. At times it seemed that only God knew how important we were, how right, how pure.

But isolation and rejection by “The World” only confirmed our self-importance.

The sense of being like the tribes of Israel wandering the desert, with enemies on all sides, was the underlying reality of my childhood.

I think it was shared by my three sisters... Susan took grim satisfaction at the looming damnation of just about everyone but us. Debby wept and redoubled her efforts. Priscilla got nervous and threw up. I hid.

Conservative Christians are people of high integrity and seriousness. I believe them when they say they do experience  marginalisation. In the good old days their  social mores, backed by the criminal law and psychiatric practice, absolutely ruled the roost.

Cultural development since 1945, for better or worse, has left many conventionally minded Christians dazed and confused. A character in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger says of her father — “Poor Daddy. He’s a pot-plant left over from the Edwardian high summer who can’t understand why the sun isn’t shining any more.”

Where does this marginalisation leave them? basically in the same position as the rest of the population.  Conservative Christians have a right to hold and express their views and be heard with respect like anyone else. That does not require everyone else to agree with them. Some people, most people, including other Christians, may well disagree with them. Nor does their right to be heard give them moral high ground from which to curtail the rights and dignities of others. They simply have to take their chances with everybody else,a nd be judged on the merits of their case.

That is not persecution. It’s reality. It’s Democracy.

True Leadership: getting real

We Brits have a maddening love / hate relationship with the NHS. We know, frankly, we’re damned lucky to have the services of some of the world’s best medical carers freely available at the point of need. The past thirty years in the UK has seen neonatal death plummet and that most basic statistic of all, life expectancy, increase — all this at a significantly lower cost in relation to GDP of private systems.

In a peculiarly British way many of us seem to be saying that the whole thing is terrible but the people are wonderful. We often express profound admiration for the people who actually look after us, but frustration with the system — bureaucratic, Balkanised, political (in a bad sense). Of course medical carers are not infallible, and some degree of snafu occurs in all human endeavours, but it has to be minimised when lives are at stake, and community hospitals are public places. Healthcare leaders, with their own stresses and pressures, prone to cynicism and denial, are always on stage. If people screw up in most industry and commerce, earnings per share dip. Get it wrong in yours, and people die. This can lead to a paralysing fear of failure that hobbles all effective leadership; a kind of defensive pact with mediocrity.

Cue the most inspiring leadership day I have spent in a long time — not a course, but a day visit with colleagues from Milton Keynes (where chaplaincy is in need of a reboot) to Wexham Park Hospital, which serves Slough and East Berkshire. Peter Blackshire, co-ordinating chapain, and colleagues gave generously of their time, and involved leaders within the hospital from palliative care and nursing services, along with the chair and CEO of the Trust.

It’s no simple Polyanna-ish story.

Heatherwood and Wexham Park Foundation Trust has had struggles and serious public failures in the not-so-distant past, and has undergone its own sometimes painful reboot.

If you’re trying to lead in a recovering organisation with limited resources, how does hope arise, and the ability to turn things round?

1. The foundation of everything is realism about what’s amiss, but refusal to give in to it, blame others, or collude. It’s values not target driven, and works hard to connect people with the reasons they wanted to be practitioners in the first place, not synthetic goals. Again and again we were struck by openness and lack of management hype. At first this seemed weird, but as it became plain many people were interested in the unvarnished truth, everything came into focus. No boasting, no hype — just workmanlike pragmatism, and a dogged focus on values. We heard about the temptation to be driven by targets to the extent corners are cut. When you stop being target-driven, you actually take a hit — but the hit is an act of faith that if you stick with your values and resist cutting corners, in the end, you will do a better job. That takes real courage and, dare I say it, faith. I wish some churches felt freer to be honest about what’s not working, more rigorous in not cutting corners and tolerating crapada.
   
   
2. Hospital Chaplaincy is not running a Church in a hospital, but delivering siritual care across the board in collaboration with others. Healthcare systems are like water systems — everything affects everything else. If there’s poison in the system, everybody gets poisoned. If different trades take hierarchy or status more seriously than the over-riding point of the exercise, or their part of the action more serously than other practitioners’, attention is distracted, the practitioner community compromised, and patients harmed. Managing chaplaincy isn’t about being nice to chaplains, but everybody respecting everybody else, and honoring everyone’s role in the delivery of the service. Everyone is a practitioner, and the task of everyone else is to maximise their own performance in such a way that all practitioners can function in an integrated, aware and self-aware, way. If you’re angry, use the energy to raise your own game, don’t turn it against someone else. The unity and integration of the whole depends on respect, fuelled by open communication.
   
   
3. The most stressful and wearing place to work is somewhere where you can’t be yourself. In life, in healthcare, in Church, hypocrisy is like Japanese knotweed, or fire at sea. There is a continual drag towards it within the system (what Christians call “the fall”) and open communication with mutual accountability is the only medicine. Communication needs to be as clean as you can make it, remembering at all times that God gave human beings two ears and one mouth.
   

I came away with much to ponder, not only about hospitals, but about leadership and certainly about the ways we do Church. It also sowed real seeds of hope about a new kind of chaplaincy in MK.

Particular thanks to those who led us through the day; squirm and duck for the credits — It’s an unforgivable sin for some British to acknowledge other people’s work, especially in the public sector, without being cynical and/or nasty about them, but this is what I want to thank you for:

• Peter Blackshire (Co-ordinating chaplain) — There’s lots to work out, but you’ve got a real team, and it shows. Many ministers, and healthcare professionals, say they want to work as a team — few acually do. Insecurity and Ego compromises their best efforts. Your clarity of purpose and consistency shone through. May your trolley arrive soon!
  

• Clare Culpin (Director of Nursing) I found your awareness of everyone as a practitioner, courage and realism, refreshing and inspiring. I seldom meet anyone who has come through 20 years plus of leadership in medical care with such a focussed and lively sense of how things actually work together.

• Fiona Lisney (Palliative Care Consultant) showed me how soft and hard skills (to use conventional distinctions) actually can work together to help patients at what could be the most awful time of life, the journey home. You actually demonstrated how to get a system working for patients.

• Julie Burgess (Chief Executive) We were overwhemed by your realism, you will to listen and respond to anyone, your awareness of your context, along with your uncompromiseing commitment to your core values. The heart of your leadership seemed to be willingness to take risks in not cutting corners. I wish there were more of that kind of faith and courage around.
  

• Chris Langley (Trust Chairman) Perhaps it comes from the retail background, but your will to take the people the trust serves seriously came over clearly. Assertive loudmouth leadership like the Apprentice on TV gets organisations so far — but to excel you need something very different — passion and humility, openness and rigorous commitment to making the syetem coherent and effective.

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

Vicarage Allsorts: Clergy Supply

A House of Bishops paper from the Ministry Division explores issues of clergy quantity and quality. TA story here and Dave Walker’s roundup of blog reactions here. It began life as an attempt to scope issues arising from Synod pensions debates. The paper gathered no evidence about working clergy — just crude stats and a straw poll among diocesan bishops. So you won’t find any juicy stories about what bishops think of vicars; in fact you won’t find any juicy stories at all. It’s just a roundup of very basic supply figures, and a very brief snapshot based on a round robin of bishops about medium term training requirements.

I’ll comment on quality in the next day or so, but today, demographic facts — all in the public domain, but collected here for their Lordships contemplation — comparative figures about numbers of clergy and licensed ministers to 1959/60. Why 1959/60? I don’t know, but that was the height of the postwar ecclesiastical boom and the youngest deacon ordained in 1959 is now 76 and can thus be assumed to have had a full career, or not, in the system.
These are crude and dirty statistics. Active vicars are comparatively easy to count but many lay ministers, like youth and families workers, don’t have formal LLM licences. These are just conventional “robed and up front” figures.

After 30 years of designer angst about clergy shortages I am amazed that this should be so, but the simple fact is that there are actually more active C of E collars on the streets of England in 2005 than in 1959. I don’t know about you, but this surprised me. It also strikes me as the kind of raw figure that won’t be of any interest to Fleet Street, because it neither provokes fear and anguish, nor validates their prejudices and fantasies about the C of E.

The distribution, however has entirely changed. The preponderance is distributed more, I would guess, according to population. The bad story then was rural/urban. Now I would anticipate it to be North/West as against South/East. There are far fewer full time collars of the conventional sort, but far more retired active and self supporting. Looking ahead this means their shelf life and deployability is far lower. People in the 1960’s complained that vicars were too young and inexperienced about the rest of life. Now they complain that they’re all on second careers. You can’t have it both ways! Or can you? Training needs, however are radically different.

The variety of backgrounds I would reckon is greater than in 1959, though diversity is still not as high as it should be. I would also hazard a guess these figures hide a significant shortage of young clergy, and that the general volatility of people in the world of work, combined with today’s much shorter/ fragmented career patterns mean that supply is in a far more volatile position than these figures might otherwise imply.

Ministry in many areas is highly dependent on retired clergy — cherish and honour them; not only as devoted temps, but as the statesmen and elders of our enterprise, holding a vital part of its corporate memory. Some have done 40 years+ in the trenches, and that deserves profound respect. In 1959 a fair number of parish clergy were over retirement age; which didn’t come in for clergy until 1971. Therefore the 1959/60 figures conceal many clergy over today’s retirement age. As we all live longer, there is, of course, a fascinating discussion to be had about future retirement trends.

Finally, Pay. The bad story in 1959, apart from its lowness was that the Church was almost entirely dependent on dead people to pay the staff. Living giving was pathetic. Now inherited resource goes into pensions, and these figures reveal exactly a characteristic UK demographic about retired numbers. The Church turned turtle financially in the 1990’s, and now pay and future pensions (8K a head a year) are pretty much funded by living giving. It’s healthier, you may say, but more precarious, also. I hazard a guess that UK Pay rises in the past 50 years have run way ahead of general inflation. The stipend has, I would reckon, fallen seriously behind as source of income.

There is a theoretical question in my mind, however. What exactly is it we pay ministers for, when we pay them? If we could be clearer about that, the mix between self supporting and paid could be scoped far more strategically, and aligned with our values. But this leads onto what you may think is the more interesting bit of this paper, perhaps; some thoughts about quality... watch this space.

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...
   

Spy vs Spy?

Privacy International monitors the extent to which personal privacy is vulnerable in different countries around the world. The UK is right up there in the superleague of “endemic surveillance societies.” Lagging far behind are countries like Germany, Belgium, and Italy. Greece and Romania hardly score anything. We just manage to beat the French, which will be a comfort to some. The UK has the lowest ratings in the world, alongside Singapore, Russia, China, Malaysia and the US.

Governments photograph and snoop on individual people, of course, to keep everyone safe from crime and terrorism. This is obviously sometimes necessary. But hang on; It is simply not significantly more dangerous out on the streets of Luxembourg, Greece or Portugal, than those of Russia, the US or, come to that, the UK. We experience far higher rates of crime and terrorism, along with our superleague companions. Of course there’s an element of chicken and egg about this. We experience crime that has to be fought, so we tighten up on everyone. But I wonder:

1. Where and how does this process of progressively spying on everybody end? At what point could we break into the cycle of fear inducing more intrusive security measures that inspire more fear, and how? Or is the whole process just inexorable, until we all really end up in a kind of 1984 state?
2. Security strategies aimed at containment can work well in short term and immediate ways. But what are the positive factors that enable many other countries to protect personal privacy better, whilst at the same time enjoying a higher underlying level of public safety?

Answers, on a postcard?