IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY - John Betjeman
This is, of course, a satirical composition in which John Betjeman imagines an upper class woman attending Evening Prayer in Westminster Abbey during WWII. It is clever, and uncomfortably true. True not only of the class and disposition represented, but of the distorting mess so many of us make not only of our prayers but also our ideologies and professed attitudes. It is a lifelong process of interrogating ourselves before we begin to see, then transform, our often self-centred positions. Surely one of the purposes of prayer. Click Read More

Have you noticed how, in recent years, an obsession with 'leadership' and 'leaders' has crept into much discourse (and fantasy) about business, the third sector, the public sector and even the churches? It's a great bore. Organisations need competent managers at every level, and those in such roles will, inevitably and necessarily, influence, shape and 'lead' developments in those organisations. But what seems to have happened is that this essential function and aspect has now become personalised into 'a leader'.  This is ego-talk. Many find it irresistible.

In the church (I am mostly familiar with the Church of England) the 'leadership' fetish has grown apace. A small example is the growing number of church websites that now list the clergy as 'the leadership team' - and I have seen some that locate them in 'the senior leadership team'. Frankly, it's all so desperate. What should be fellowship often seems now to be follower-ship.

To have leaders, you need the led. There is a place for this where it is operationally and functionally necessary for tightly defined outcomes (think uniformed services and organisations with precise functions and outcomes). But in Christian communities it can only produce drone-disciples who surrender responsibility for their own Christian life to the 'experts', the leaders. And don't think that the ghastly cliché about 'servant-leader' avoids the pitfalls and dangers.

I recently attended a mandatory safeguarding course, attended mostly by clergy and with some churchwardens. The (very competent) facilitator had, as part of her input, referred to the role that power and power-imbalances play in church abuse, and had illustrated this by some high-profile cases. As the event progressed, I was struck by how often 'leader' and 'leadership' were used by participants - in a sometimes slightly self-aggrandising way ("As the leader of my parish..."). I pointed this out, this link with what we had been told and how the conversation was going. There was some agreement, but others thought the two things were quite separate.

Mainline church denominations 'embody' power relations and differentials in various ways, some subtle. Priests and bishops over laity, for example. Church architecture is another (the sacred sanctuary and altar, with the laity in their theatre-like pews). And another is found in who may speak and who is required to 'reply' following a set script. These are aspects of liturgical exchanges and liturgical life.

I set these matters out bluntly to illustrate dimensions we often don't see clearly. There are many clergy who operate within these structures with attentiveness, humanity and sensitivity, and who mitigate the more dangerous aspects of the leadership fetish. They focus, first, on being disciples. But there are some clergy who don't. And there are laity who like to be 'led'. That does not make for mature Christian explorers.

I attended an All Souls Eucharist, but did not stay the full course. It was the sermon what done it. A collection of unexamined clichés delivered in a sing-songy voice. I was not surprised. And the accompanying Faure Requiem I also tend to regard as clichéd these days, a victim of its cosy popularity and Classic FM promotion. But the sermon. It was not good. Laced with a liberal cleric’s references to the bereaved’s pain (grief no longer serving as a description, all inner distress is these days ‘pain’) and references to ‘those on the other side’. The delivery was sugary, the cadences of the sentimentalist, the preacher giving hints that they had never really experienced the horror of bereavement, or of the attachments and intimacies that give rise to it.

Should we be worried when risky behaviour seems cosy? My friend Fr John Rowe felt that church life - unintentionally - ran the risk of 'trivialisation by repetition' in making the Eucharist (Holy Communion, the Mass) so common a feature of its liturgical life.

Repetition can be a good thing, or at least carry good effect, and my own regular celebration of the Eucharist, and participation in it, has had many good, habit-forming effects (I believe). But I see his point, and it is one I share and like occasionally to highlight, by commenting, when asked, that I celebrated the Eucharist and 'no-one was hurt'.

I don't want anyone to be hurt. Of course not. But I want us to be changed by it; even shocked and shaken (or if not shaken, stirred). And that's, surely, the danger of too much repetition of this central liturgical happening of Christian life: the weight-carrying, meaning-carrying message and narrative which the Eucharist embodies and asserts ought not become 'just a thing'.

I have sometimes heard other clergy speak in emotive and disturbingly cosy terms of celebrating the Eucharist "and encountering Jesus there" and of finding such daily liturgical adventures to be essential to life.  I am uneasy with this kind of perspective. Encounters with the Risen Christ are not confined to liturgy (there's surely a case for saying the Risen Christ might be far more interested in speaking to us in the ordinary business of living). And liturgy should shake us up from time to time. Hard hats on.

Come, ye thankful people, come, / Raise the song of harvest home!
All is safely gathered in, / Ere the winter storms begin;
God, our Maker, doth provide / For our wants to be supplied;
Come to God's own temple, come; / Raise the song of harvest home!

I was driving to the next village for the paper and some provisions when BBC R4 started its Harvest Festival Sunday Worship. I've always had a sense that the broadcasting of church services does not really work. To say its like overhearing other people having sex isn't quite the thing, but has a hint of it. In both cases, I'm happy for them, but don't wish to be an aural partner to the proceedings.  And whereas the latter don't (usually) want you to hear, and are not addressing you as an attendant third party, the church gig is addressed to you. They are polite and welcoming, as if you were visiting their house.

Church services are alien events to the majority.  The players in broadcast services tend to be keen to talk of welcome (fair enough of course) and also of the ever-present God with whom they are on intimate terms.  A common ploy, I've noticed, is to talk of their church buildings as where 'prayer is valid' (cf. T. S. Eliot's Little Gidding) and where the very walls are saturated with it.  The implied message is that God appears to be domiciled in churches, and one is left with the impression may not often venture out. But the Gospel is not concerned with what happens inside churches, but what one makes of life in light of the claims and accounts of the man Jesus.  And when did you last hear a church service broadcast that featured intelligent, sharp accounts from faithful lay Christians about being the church beyond the building?

I don’t recall when exactly I became alert to the easy and self-referential use of the possessive, but it was very many years ago. I am perfectly happy with it in some settings: my daughter/son; my partner, my home – though personally I’d use ‘our’ for two of those.  I have always disliked the use of ‘my’ when used by people to describe their colleagues - especially subordinate ones.  I was once in a lift at the headquarters of the social services department I had just joined, to be introduced as ‘one of my social workers’ by the Area Director. As a rooky I had no business taking offence, but I did.
 
Is the use of the ‘my’ possessive such a problem? I think so, for it defines the speaker as the reference point of all things. Me. Mine. The human ego is a slippery critter and does much harm.  Ownership is one of its favourite claims.  Do I have life or does life have me?  The latter I think.
 
I shiver very slightly when people speak of ‘my career’. For two reasons. One is the ‘my’ again; the other is the pretension of it.  I’d rather speak of the work I do.  I realise this line of thinking – and reacting – goes against the modern grain.  The modern grain is concerned with me and mine.  The egotistical self, again.
 
In church circles I flinch at the very common ‘my ministry’ as used by clergy.  I had always thought it was Christ’s ministry.  And what is wrong with work – the work I do (in the church)?  Language defines and too often divides what ought not to be divided.  Too many things – phrases, privileges – already separate the clergy from the laity in the life of the church. A trend so entrenched hardly anyone notices it.
 
But the church is small fry in the scheme of things.  The tendency to think and act in possessives – me, mine – harms us all and all human activity - indeed, it is harming our irreplaceable planet. Is it fanciful to think that violence in its many forms is often brought to birth by it?

Note to self and anyone else who might be interested: it is vital (one’s own soul may depend upon it) to avoid sentimentality in Christian liturgy and worship. 

The message of love in the Gospels (harsh, costly, electric, realistic and more generous that we can imagine) is distorted by this contagious, hapless condition.  What forms does it take?  Perhaps the most commonplace is its wish to make participants feel good.  The Gospel becomes always, only and pre-eminently a consolation of a sugary kind.  The examples are legion.  One is so ubiquitous it is not seen: the equation of the Gospel with niceness.  Christians who are not ‘nice’ like this are thought deficient even when they are loving and just.  Liturgically, sentimentality finds various forms.  I have observed the celebrant at the Eucharist, when presiding versus populum (facing the people), repeatedly eye-balling and scanning the faces of the people with a warm and soft expression rather like an ingratiating TV host, even when reciting the words of institution. On this theme I discovered an interesting article about priestly narcissism which points out that since the move from ad orientem to versus populum (the move from having the priest and people face east to having the priest and congregation face each other) the priest becomes, inevitably, the focus of the action and is obliged to become a ‘performer’. [1]  This perspective seems significant and worthy of more thought yet I have never heard it taken up or discussed.

An apparently more harmless liturgical expression of this sentimentalisation of liturgy is illustrated by the postscript some clergy add to the blessing:  …And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit be with you and those whom you love, now and forever.  On the face of it this is good.  Who could object?  People like it.  Those who attend only when they have to – baptisms, funerals - especially like it.  It is inclusive and encouraging and human.  All true, I suppose.  But what is its unintentional effect?  To make God a chum who likes the people we like.  And what about that bastard down the road, or the registered sex offender, or the Colonel Gaddafi's of this world?  I take the pronouncing of liturgical blessings seriously, and with the same intensity I recoil at those people who unctuously say Bless you! in conversation. I know, I know: I am first cousin to Victor Meldrew.  Bless him!  But I believe there is a serious point here.  Perhaps it is that God is neither partial nor a feel-good god, one we must not trivialise.

[1] Messing with the Mass: The problem of priestly narcissism today. Paul Vitz & Daniel C. Vitz. Though written from a Roman Catholic perspective the insights apply elsewhere to liturgical activity. See also here in the blog A New Parson's Handbook