Anonymous Tosh?

Every now and then an envelope arrives like this one from Slough yesterday. I tear it open expectantly, and the first thing I look for is the address at the top and the name at the bottom...

Oh dear! I am disappointed because, to put it as kindly as I can, although the writer has rather trenchant views about a Vicar in Bucks, s/he seems to have forgotten to give a name or address.

I used actually to read letters like this, but these days I don’t. Out the back of the Chaplain’s office lives a good and faithful servant called Erik the Shred. These days I invariably take letters which people have forgotten to put their names or addresses on out to Erik. He shreds them so that they can be turned into compost and Lucy uses that to grow delicious runner beans. We find that is a life-giving use for anonymous letters.

This may seem like a slightly extreme thing to do. After all, I’m a nosy person and would love to know what everyone has to say, surely. The trouble is I can’t not know what I do know, even if it’s wrong, if you get my drift.

I believe I owe my colleagues a basic loyalty where if someone was ashamed to put their name to their letter, that’s the end of the matter.

I remember people saying to me when I was a parish priest “Rector I shouldn’t be telling you this.” The simple answer, which accords with my Scots Presbyterian genes, is “well don’t, then.” Bitterness, slander, gossip, words that say “Raca” arising from thoughts that breach the ninth commandment, grow from such roots. best strangle them at birth.

It may be that the letter I never read was the sort of letter that made the writer feel better to have written, but should, in fact, never be read in its original form. There are letters like that. I hope this is one of them. It may be that they really want to draw to my attention to something with words for which that they can take responsibility, in which case I’d be delighted to hear from them. It’ll get here even quicker with the correct postcode (“9BG” not “9BD”)

Erik is a hungry lad. He has only had two such snacks in the past five years, which, given the amount of mail we get, is high testimony to the basic character and decency of people out there. I wonder if my “straight to the shredder unread” policy is a bit hard-nosed, but suspect it’s the correct thing to do... surely?

Accounting for Everybody

Most of us like to think we believe that people matter more than things. Archbishop Rowan’s New Year message in 2009 challenged us to be more honest and consistent about this belief. Taking as his starting point the story of Laurence the Deacon, who told Roman authorities that the poor supported by the Church were its treasures, he asks

What would our life be like if we really believed that our wealth, our treasure, was our fellow human beings? Religious faith points to a God who takes most seriously, and values most extravagantly, the people who often look the least productive and successful — as if none of us could really be said to be doing well unless these people were secure. And as we look around in our own country as well as worldwide, this should trigger some hard questions...

This year’s takes a similar theme, and raises the stakes to a global scale: —

There are fewer and fewer problems in our world that are just local. Suffering and risk spread across boundaries, even that biggest of all boundaries between the rich and the poor. Crises don’t stop at national frontiers. That’s one thing terrorism, and environmental challenge and epidemic disease have taught us. We share the risks. The big question is “Can we share the hopes and create the possibilities?” Because it’s when we do share the hopes that we really see what it is to belong together as human beings, discovering our own humanity as we honour the human dignity of others...

The challenge to discover our own humanity as we honour the human dignity of others raises its own hard questions for a society in which the gap between rich and poor has, almost unbelievably, been widening these past thirty years. It calls to mind a report produced late last year by the New Economics Foundation — A Bit Rich: calculating the real value to society of different professions. In the spirit of progressive economics, it’s available free as a .pdf.

The report examines the real value to society of six very different jobs. These professions come with big mythic perceptions and assumptions in the great game of Careers — City banker, nursery worker, advertising executive, hospital cleaner, tax accountant, waste recycling worker.
The result isn’t a simple game of goodies and baddies, but it does challenge the Great Golden Myth of eighties yuppiedom.

In its purest form, the GGM tells us that a tiny elite of pangalacticaly superior individuals create wealth for society, which largely consists of lumpen drones and wasters. Any silly nonsense that these self-designated “Wealth Creators” care to indulge is thus, ipso facto, OK. Fairness, like taxes, is strictly for the little people. And the lesson of the past year or so is that not only is life in the golden dome golden, but largely consequence-free as well. Nice work if you can get it.

NEF’s report does not call into question the right to private property, or fair reward for labours and risks, or differential remuneration. It does, however, suggest we push the envelope beyond considerations of the naked cash nexus in assessing the social and environmental costs and benefits of all jobs.

So how do we account human worth? How should we? It’s as much about what we notice and our methods as the conclusions we reach...

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.

Bad attitude, Low performance

After all this anxiety about good and bad vicars, it’s vaguely reassuring to find evidence that other professionals experience low self image and react sarcastically to the public, too.

The Art and Craft of Life and Work

What makes work a work of art? Short articles can repay pondering awhile — incuding Hilary Austen Johnson in the JBS, Artistry for the Strategist. Excellence shines out of some work — Mastery + Originality = Artistry. It makes something really subtle and clever look easy and fresh. You get it in art, or in music, when you sense that the notes are in exactly the right place. You can find it in any field of risky endeavour, including leadership. Some think Artistry is Voodoo magic that you're born with, or not. In fact it’s acquired — learned by trial and error. Even Mozart took six years to learn how to write symphonies!

It is developed through participation in a discipline as action in that discipline unfolds. Taking action allows us to generate knowledge through time.

Sheer Plod makes Plough-down Sillion Shine. So say the Police — and Gerald Manley Hopkins. Three things prevent us becoming original masters of our craft:

1. Trying to copy other people’s finished performances thinking it will take us directly to our goal. This is why How-To books promise so much more than they deliver. Even if, improbably, you produce good work, as Billy Graham used to say, “sleeping in the garage don’t make you a car.” Artistry is an emergent capability and you can’t just make it happen. Being too captivated by the finished product distracts you from the sources of your own capability. Very rarely, if ever, does anybody get a hole in one.
2. True artists know there's no finished product. Artistry evolves as understanding, ability and preferences evolve. It’s a constant learning process. Each peak only leads on to another peak.
3. It is not possible to work in an artistic fashion without experiencing failure. Everything is provisional. Studios are full of things that didn’t quite come off, which you work to improve. Failure and success themselves become hard to pin down sometimes.
   

In other words, it’s all about Faith —

1. Faith grasps hold of what could be, but isn’t captivated by the vision to the extent of losing touch with the infrastructural processes going on in the believer.
2. True Faith is always pressing onward towards the goal of the upward call...
3. Faith doesn’t give up, or get surrender to smugness.

Along with good ol’ fashioned fear, what blocks us from true artistry is perfectionism — fantasy that disconnects us from the creative processes inside us, or satisfies us with second best, or makes us feel that if it’s not perfect first time it’s not worth trying and trying again. And when we try to learn and grow in our work, reading how-to books or however, we need to do so with great realism and humility before the truth.

Is our work an act of faith? how could it become a work of art?

L4/44-50 Bringing it all home at Easter

Not a bad approach and landing. Flunked 46 and 47, but managed most of the others; although the day job that helped with some tasks didn’t seem to help with others, and made one completely impossible:

44. Help someone carry a burden
Talking through job applications with a colleague or drumming up cash for historic church buildings could be seen as this, or are these activities too metaphorical? Carried the bag back to the car after our weekly shop at Sainsbury’s, just in case...

45. Forgive someone
Hard to think of anyone who’s wronged me really, but I forgive them anyway! As someone more sinning than sinned against, I’ve wondered down the years, about the difference between saying “sorry” (where the wrongdoer retains control) and “please forgive me” (where control passes to the person who was wronged.) Why is forgiveness such a dying art? perhaps many people are just so angry so much of the time, they just can’t focus on anything else?

46. Make Easter Card for a neighbour
Failed. Dong. I always love to get them from the select few friends who bother, and feel I ought to bother, and maybe we should make more of Easter Cards than Christmas cards, but never get round to it...

47. Polish someone’s shoes for them
Only bishop in England not doing this today. Next year? I miss it from parish life, though it was always difficult to get people to consent to having their feet washed. Maybe we’re just too prissy for this stuff in England...

48. Five Minutes Silence at 12 noon
Impossible, since I was kicking off a three hours service at exactly 12 noon, and if I’d fallen into total silence at that point someone would have called an ambulance.

49. Watch a film about Jesus Life
I need to admit that filmic Jesus seldom floats my boat. In the first century they had real problems accepting Jesus’ full humanity, but those are nothing compared to fifties Hollywood. Monty Python’s Life of Brian, pretty much a spoof of Hollywood Jesus, had a point. Mel Gibson was gross and schlocky, with a few shafts of light, but I couldn’t watch Casualty for months afterwards. So I settled for The Jesus of Montreal, which accepts Jesus’ basic humanity and is true to what it purports to be rather than creating a silly Disney world.

50. Celebrate Easter
Did that, round the fire first thing, in the snow at Coleshill, and at Buckinghamshire’s smallest parish church — Little Hampden.

PS Lucy’s and my chocolate fast did happen this year, though there was one party at which we were uncertain whether a brown smudge on a cream slice did or didn’t contain Chocolate. I resolved the situation by issuing a Rabbinic style decision that it didn’t. Perhaps I'm beginning to get the hang of this religion thing...

Aircrew or Snakes on a plane?

In every area of life Teams draw the best out of people and get the job done better. Sadly, many teams aren’t really teams — just clumps, playing out their inability to get on together, and fouling each other up. That really matters if the Benedictine principle that best discipleship comes through community works. It does.

Linda Gratton and Tamara Erickson have published a helpful (current) HBR article on Eight ways to build Collaborative Teams. Biggest foul ups?

1. Size — too big in business (too small in Church?)
2. Badly managed diversity
   
3. Virtual working: doing most things by email rather than personally
   
4. Herding Cats: High education levels and overactive Egos

With a spiritual twist, these foul-ups can be radically upsetting and intractible. You end up with a team that isn't a team, just the Vicar’s fan club — or, even worse, anti-fan club. So what? Gratton and Erickson suggest eight ways of fighting back and making your team a real team:

1. Investing in an environment to support real teamwork — in business, designing working space appropriately. In Church, taking the pews out (in various senses).
2. Modelling collaborative behaviour — The same issue in any context. Leaders and senior staff have to do what they commend to every one else. Just do it.
   
3. Creating a gift culture — supporting social and professional networks, and mentoring. In Church growing cultures of generosity rather than a demoralising rationing mentality that kills off all joy.
4. Training to raise emotional intelligence. Good news — anyone can acquire people skills if they work at it. Bad news — they have to work at it. Focused learning works infinitely better in this area than happenstance and good intentions.
5. Working to grow a strong sense of community. People often look to churches for community, but it has to be worked at hard, especially in dormitory communities of pressurised people. ‘Christians are people who pray and have parties.’ (Bishop Jack Nicholls)
   
6. Assigning leaders who are task and relationship orientated. Brits tend to be task driven and relationship weak (stand offish and/or implicit).
7. Building on heritage relationships. In business, putting people who know each other together. In Church, bearing in mind the baggage, and using positive baggage to hold luggage that needs transporting. Also, avoiding year zero thinking, and using the (usually abundant) history for blessing and enrichment not cursing and limiting possibilities.
   
8. Role Clarity/ Task ambiguity. With fuzzy generalised idealistic expectations, and the way they load all accountability on to the few, along with their tendency to no agreed metrics and high judgmentalism, churches are almost conspiracies to foster Role ambiguity and Task Clarity!

So, team ministry or ministry team, ask:

• Is our team a team?
  
• How is this so?
• If not, why not?
  
• What's the single thing I can do to make us more what we say we are?