What Happened ! – A personal view byJohn Kennaugh
"It is a brave man (or women) indeed who applies for the job of Oversight Minister. Apart from having to spread his services thinly among many Churches his only means of trying to implement the aspirations of those above is persuasion – he has no sanctions. PCCs are made up of a complex mix of people whose only essential qualification is a willingness to volunteer. The phrase “herding cats” springs to mind. In the case of my own Deanery – East Wivelshire – two of the three Oversight Ministers have just resigned after about a year in the job." John KennaughKeen readers of this blog will remember a thought-provoking post back in March this year by a Church Treasurer in east Cornwall. What is going on? John Kennaugh asked. Six months on, John has written another article - 'What happened?' - this time about bureaucracy and Oversight Ministry, which will be debated at this coming Saturday's deanery synod.
In 1955, a chap called Professor Parkinson wrote a paper [1]. Many people have realised that - while it is light-hearted in approach - he actually identified a very real phenomenon. The basic problem is this. If you are manufacturing something, or even if you are simply running a window cleaning business, you have something by which you can measure your useful output and the ratio of output to the number of people achieving it will give you a yardstick to measure performance.
The same is not the case with a bureaucracy. Essentially everyone in a bureaucracy may be beavering away, believing that what they are doing is essential with no criteria to measure what, if anything, is usefully achieved. Parkinson writes:
"Politicians and taxpayers have assumed that a rising total in the number of civil servants must reflect a growing volume of work to be done. Cynics, in questioning this belief, have imagined that the multiplication of officials must have left some of them idle or all of them able to work for shorter hours. But this is a matter in which faith and doubt seem equally misplaced. The fact is that the number of the officials and the quantity of the work to be done are not related to each other at all. The rise in the total of those employed is governed by Parkinson's Law, and would be much the same whether the volume of the work were to increase, diminish or even disappear."Essentially a bureaucracy has a natural tendency to increase in size though maybe not for some of the reasons Parkinson suggests. He uses the admiralty as an example. Showing that between 1914 and 1928 the number of admiralty officials increased by 78% despite a drastic cut of 68% in the number of ships and a cut of 31% in officers and men.
Nearer to home, in the period 1959 - 2022, while Church of England congregations dropped 65% and clergy dropped by 45%, Diocesan support staff increased from 250 to 6500 which I make an annual compound increase of 5.31% which is consistent with Parkinson's conclusions that the increase in staff in any bureaucracy "will invariably prove to be between 5.17 percent and 6.56 percent per annum, irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done."
The bureaucracy at the upper echelons of the CofE has expanded and this has required every diocese to expand to handle the extra work it produces. In essence a bureaucracy creates work, fulfilling Parkinson’s prophesy. All concerned will be working extremely hard. All concerned will be convinced that they are doing an important job which makes it exceedingly difficult to put the process in reverse. Parkinson makes no suggestion as to how it might be done. The only thing which will stop a bureaucracy expanding is when financial constraints bring it to a halt. In the case of the admiralty when the treasury freezes its budget.
The CofE bureaucracy expansion has not been halted by financial constraints when it should have been. The CofE has a massive income from investments and property it has acquired over centuries and I believe the surplus facilitated the expansion. However it did not stop expanding when all the surplus was used so more income was required. It started using glebe rents as an additional source when morally, if not legally, glebe income should be used to support parish Churches. That was still not enough so now it is reducing the number of clergy and syphoning money from the voluntary contributions made by parishioners to support their Churches. Note that parishioners were never consulted and a large proportion of parishioners are pensioners. You have pensioners making sacrifices to support their local Church – which is run by unpaid volunteers – unwittingly paying for paid bureaucrats.
The resulting reorganisation involves bigger groupings of Churches. It is a brave man (or women) indeed who applies for the job of Oversight Minister. Apart from having to spread his services thinly among many Churches his only means of trying to implement the aspirations of those above is persuasion – he has no sanctions. PCCs are made up of a complex mix of people who’s only essential qualification is a willingness to volunteer. The phrase “herding cats” springs to mind. In the case of my own Deanery – East Wivelshire – two of the three Oversight Ministers have just resigned after about a year in the job.One criterium to assess what is “usefully achieved” by the Diocesan support staff might be to ask what would happen if the Diocese ceased to exist? What would the actual impact be? What would your Church actually miss? Could it still function? This is an area in which I have no expertise. I give up my time for my Church but my contribution does not include organisation or the “worship” side of it, so I must leave this question to others, but there does appear to be a contradiction. On the one hand that Churches are so self sufficient they can manage with even fewer clergy to help them and on the other that they are so totally helpless they need a massive team of paid bureaucrats to support what they are doing. Maybe I am naïve in thinking that what my own Church community is trying to do is essentially very simple. Worship God, spread the teaching of Jesus, keep a roof over our head, and try to make a difference in our community
Traditionally those at Parish level have looked up to the diocese as a wise and benevolent institution with their interests at heart and have been guided by it, but more and more are starting to question whether the changes are putting the interests of diocese first at the expense of parish worship. One might believe that the effectiveness of a Navy depends primarily on the number and quality of its ships and the seamen manning them likewise many believe that God’s work is best done at Parish Church and congregation level.
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