I have been wondering whether the approach of Ivan Illich (1926–2002) offers a lens through which to examine the present problems of the Church of England. Click 'read more'
Illich (a Catholic priest) was writing principally about the Catholic Church and about modern institutions generally. His most relevant writings include The Vanishing Clergyman and The Seamy Side of Charity (both 1967), Deschooling Society (1971), Tools for Conviviality (1973) and his contribution to Disabling Professions (1977). His central concern was not simply that institutions become bureaucratic, it was that institutions can eventually frustrate the purposes for which they were created.
The institutionalisation of Christianity
His starting point would probably be the distinction between Christian life and the machinery created to support Christian life. In Deschooling Society he argued that modern societies confuse substantive goods with the institutions designed to provide them: education becomes schooling; health becomes medical treatment; mobility becomes transportation. The institution effectively acquires ownership of the underlying good.
Translated ecclesiologically, the danger would be that Christianity becomes identified with what the Church organisation provides: authorised worship, accredited ministry, diocesan programmes, courses, church buildings, strategies and institutional initiatives.
Faith may consequently become something administered rather than something practised.
Illich would not conclude that organisation is unnecessary. His question would be whether organisation remains a servant of Christian life or whether Christian life gradually must conform itself to the requirements of the organisation.
The professionalisation of ministry
Illich became deeply suspicious of professions which first identify a human need and then establish themselves as the authorised experts capable of satisfying it. In Disabling Professions he described professions as acquiring the power to define both people's needs and the appropriate remedies.
The ecclesiastical analogy is obvious. Ministry can become an activity principally performed by people who have been selected, trained, authorised and professionally recognised. The unintended consequence is that ordinary Christians may come to believe themselves comparatively incompetent – impotent, effectively - in precisely the things Christianity asks of them: praying, reading Scripture, speaking about God, caring for neighbours, discerning moral questions, sustaining communities and accompanying the dying.
The crucial Illichian question would therefore be:
Does ordained and professional ministry increase the Christian competence of other people, or gradually make them dependent upon ministers?
That is considerably more searching than simply asking whether clergy perform their jobs well.
The danger of the Church becoming a service provider
Illich would probably recognise something familiar in the language of religious provision. A parish can subtly become a provider and its congregation a clientele. Baptisms, weddings, funerals, worship, pastoral care and children's activities - even religion as entertainment - become services supplied by an organisation.
Illich's concern would not be that these things are unimportant. It would be that the relationship between people changes. Instead of Christians doing things with and for one another, specialists increasingly do things for recipients. In the life of the church this can include the effects of clericalism.
The disturbing implication is that an institution can become increasingly energetic while the people whom it serves become increasingly passive.
Counter-productivity
This is Illich’s most powerful concept for examining the Church of England. He argued that institutions frequently pass a threshold beyond which additional institutional activity begins producing the opposite of its declared purpose. Education can inhibit learning; medicine can undermine health; transport systems can make ordinary mobility more difficult. He called this counter-productivity.
Could programmes intended to promote mission consume energy that might otherwise have gone into mission? Could increasingly elaborate training make people less willing to act without training? Could efforts to strengthen leadership inadvertently weaken local initiative? Could increasingly sophisticated governance create such administrative demands that clergy and lay leaders have less time for the relationships the structures exist to support?
There is evidence that the CofE itself recognises excessive organisational complexity as a problem: its National Church Governance Programme was established explicitly to “simplify and transform” national governance, and General Synod approved implementation of reforms in 2023 and subsequent legislation in 2025.
An Illichian analysis would nevertheless ask whether simplification merely makes the machine run better or genuinely reduces people's dependence upon the machine.
Radical monopoly
Illich's concept of radical monopoly is more subtle than ordinary monopoly. He meant a situation in which an institutional system becomes so dominant that alternative ways of meeting a human need become difficult to imagine or practice. Thus, motorised transportation can redesign society in ways that make walking increasingly impractical; professional medicine can weaken confidence in ordinary capacities for dealing with sickness.
There is a possible ecclesiastical equivalent. If Christianity becomes conceptually inseparable from clergy, church buildings, organised congregations, recognised leadership, programmes and denominational structures, then Christianity outside those arrangements can begin to appear deficient.
The radical monopoly would therefore not mean that the Church prevents other organisations from providing religion. It would mean something more profound: the institutional form of Christianity might become so culturally dominant that Christians themselves struggle to imagine Christianity without it.
Conviviality: Illich's constructive alternative
In Tools for Conviviality, he distinguished systems that make people dependent from convivial tools—arrangements which enlarge people's autonomous capacity to act, create, learn and cooperate.
A genuinely Illichian Church would therefore not necessarily abolish bishops, priests, parishes, theological colleges or national institutions. It would subject them to a particular test:
Does this institution increase people's capacity to live Christianly without continually requiring the institution to intervene?
Under that criterion, a successful priest would not merely acquire a larger congregation but might make members increasingly capable of prayer, theological judgement, mutual care and Christian action without clerical supervision. Successful theological education would make theological thought less—not more—the preserve of theologians. Successful diocesan support would leave parishes more capable rather than more dependent. Successful national structures would know which matters they should deliberately leave alone. This is much closer to Illich's idea of conviviality than simply making institutions more efficient.
Illich's deepest challenge to the Church
His most radical insight may be theological rather than administrative. Christianity concerns realities which cannot finally be manufactured: faith, grace, friendship, forgiveness, reconciliation, hope, love, holiness. Institutions can create circumstances favourable to them. They cannot produce them.
Modern organisations nevertheless have a powerful tendency to convert desired outcomes into processes: establish objectives, devise programmes, train personnel, allocate resources, measure results and redesign the programme when the results disappoint.
Illich would suspect something fundamental had gone wrong whenever the Church began treating the Kingdom of God as an organisational output.
The institutionalisation of Christianity
His starting point would probably be the distinction between Christian life and the machinery created to support Christian life. In Deschooling Society he argued that modern societies confuse substantive goods with the institutions designed to provide them: education becomes schooling; health becomes medical treatment; mobility becomes transportation. The institution effectively acquires ownership of the underlying good.
Translated ecclesiologically, the danger would be that Christianity becomes identified with what the Church organisation provides: authorised worship, accredited ministry, diocesan programmes, courses, church buildings, strategies and institutional initiatives.
Faith may consequently become something administered rather than something practised.
Illich would not conclude that organisation is unnecessary. His question would be whether organisation remains a servant of Christian life or whether Christian life gradually must conform itself to the requirements of the organisation.
The professionalisation of ministry
Illich became deeply suspicious of professions which first identify a human need and then establish themselves as the authorised experts capable of satisfying it. In Disabling Professions he described professions as acquiring the power to define both people's needs and the appropriate remedies.
The ecclesiastical analogy is obvious. Ministry can become an activity principally performed by people who have been selected, trained, authorised and professionally recognised. The unintended consequence is that ordinary Christians may come to believe themselves comparatively incompetent – impotent, effectively - in precisely the things Christianity asks of them: praying, reading Scripture, speaking about God, caring for neighbours, discerning moral questions, sustaining communities and accompanying the dying.
The crucial Illichian question would therefore be:
Does ordained and professional ministry increase the Christian competence of other people, or gradually make them dependent upon ministers?
That is considerably more searching than simply asking whether clergy perform their jobs well.
The danger of the Church becoming a service provider
Illich would probably recognise something familiar in the language of religious provision. A parish can subtly become a provider and its congregation a clientele. Baptisms, weddings, funerals, worship, pastoral care and children's activities - even religion as entertainment - become services supplied by an organisation.
Illich's concern would not be that these things are unimportant. It would be that the relationship between people changes. Instead of Christians doing things with and for one another, specialists increasingly do things for recipients. In the life of the church this can include the effects of clericalism.
The disturbing implication is that an institution can become increasingly energetic while the people whom it serves become increasingly passive.
Counter-productivity
This is Illich’s most powerful concept for examining the Church of England. He argued that institutions frequently pass a threshold beyond which additional institutional activity begins producing the opposite of its declared purpose. Education can inhibit learning; medicine can undermine health; transport systems can make ordinary mobility more difficult. He called this counter-productivity.
Could programmes intended to promote mission consume energy that might otherwise have gone into mission? Could increasingly elaborate training make people less willing to act without training? Could efforts to strengthen leadership inadvertently weaken local initiative? Could increasingly sophisticated governance create such administrative demands that clergy and lay leaders have less time for the relationships the structures exist to support?
There is evidence that the CofE itself recognises excessive organisational complexity as a problem: its National Church Governance Programme was established explicitly to “simplify and transform” national governance, and General Synod approved implementation of reforms in 2023 and subsequent legislation in 2025.
An Illichian analysis would nevertheless ask whether simplification merely makes the machine run better or genuinely reduces people's dependence upon the machine.
Radical monopoly
Illich's concept of radical monopoly is more subtle than ordinary monopoly. He meant a situation in which an institutional system becomes so dominant that alternative ways of meeting a human need become difficult to imagine or practice. Thus, motorised transportation can redesign society in ways that make walking increasingly impractical; professional medicine can weaken confidence in ordinary capacities for dealing with sickness.
There is a possible ecclesiastical equivalent. If Christianity becomes conceptually inseparable from clergy, church buildings, organised congregations, recognised leadership, programmes and denominational structures, then Christianity outside those arrangements can begin to appear deficient.
The radical monopoly would therefore not mean that the Church prevents other organisations from providing religion. It would mean something more profound: the institutional form of Christianity might become so culturally dominant that Christians themselves struggle to imagine Christianity without it.
Conviviality: Illich's constructive alternative
In Tools for Conviviality, he distinguished systems that make people dependent from convivial tools—arrangements which enlarge people's autonomous capacity to act, create, learn and cooperate.
A genuinely Illichian Church would therefore not necessarily abolish bishops, priests, parishes, theological colleges or national institutions. It would subject them to a particular test:
Does this institution increase people's capacity to live Christianly without continually requiring the institution to intervene?
Under that criterion, a successful priest would not merely acquire a larger congregation but might make members increasingly capable of prayer, theological judgement, mutual care and Christian action without clerical supervision. Successful theological education would make theological thought less—not more—the preserve of theologians. Successful diocesan support would leave parishes more capable rather than more dependent. Successful national structures would know which matters they should deliberately leave alone. This is much closer to Illich's idea of conviviality than simply making institutions more efficient.
Illich's deepest challenge to the Church
His most radical insight may be theological rather than administrative. Christianity concerns realities which cannot finally be manufactured: faith, grace, friendship, forgiveness, reconciliation, hope, love, holiness. Institutions can create circumstances favourable to them. They cannot produce them.
Modern organisations nevertheless have a powerful tendency to convert desired outcomes into processes: establish objectives, devise programmes, train personnel, allocate resources, measure results and redesign the programme when the results disappoint.
Illich would suspect something fundamental had gone wrong whenever the Church began treating the Kingdom of God as an organisational output.