The Bible in TransMission - Summer 2015

Summer 2015

The Bible in Transmission A forum for change in church and culture

Leadership and virtue

Transmission

Contents

The Bible in Transmission is published by Bible Society and is fully protected by copyright.

Nothing may be reproduced either wholly or in part without prior permission. The views expressed are those of individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the position of Bible Society.

The Bible in Transmission is now featured on our web site. All previous and current articles can be found at: biblesociety. org.uk/transmission Photos: ©Terrance Emerson/ Shutterstock.com; ©iStockphoto.com/ Bet_Noire; ©iStockphoto. com/meldayus; ©iStockphotos.com/ LincolnRogers; ©giulio napolitano/Shutterstock. com; ©iStockphoto. com/ViktorCap (Collins); ©iStockphoto.com/ Onfokus; ©Peter Zvonar/ Shutterstock.com (Bickley).

2

3 Editorial

Brian Howell 5

Developing leaders Martyn Snow

7

Spirituality and leadership: The inner life of the public leader James Catford

11

An effective leader: Pope Francis servant and reformer Austen Ivereigh

14

Project 3:28: The campaign for gender justice Natalie Collins

17

Contemplating compost: Leadership lessons from the natural world Tim Harle

20

Leadership and virtue in sport Paul Bickley

23

New from Bible Society James Catford

Summer 2015

Editorial

It is significant that in the Bible, we primarily hear stories about Israel’s kings and queens, prophets and priests.

Seldom do we find a story about the common man, save for the odd carpenter or fisherman, unless they too rise to power like David or Esther. This is not to cast the biblical writers as paparazzi, only and always chasing the famous and the royal, but reflects the close link between the fate of a people and that of its leadership.

Brian Howell Brian Howell is the Dean of Studies and Research for Bible Society. He has taught Old Testament, literary criticism, and Hebrew at Sheffield University, Oak Hill College and the University of Gloucestershire.

His research interests include: metaphor theory, hermeneutics, image worship, and spiritual discernment. He has also taught and played jazz saxophone.

In the books of First and Second Kings, for example, monarchs are repeatedly evaluated using a formula that seems to overlook their economic and building achievements. King Omri, a general whose coup d’etat landed him the throne of the northern kingdom of Israel, is known from Ancient Near Eastern sources like the Meshe stele (now found in the Louvre). These sources, including his ostentatious building projects at Samaria, Tirzah and Jezreel, reveal him to have been a powerful provincial king in his day, and yet there is hardly a word of this in the Biblical text. Rather, like the rest of the Israelite and Judahite kings, Omri is evaluated according to whether or not he followed the Lord wholeheartedly, enabled or hindered his worship, and the heterodoxy (high places) or outright heresy he allowed or even promoted. But it wasn’t as if the leaders were the only ones engaged in these acts. As the leaders went, so went, with rare exception, the people. Thus, the judgment of a king’s reign was not his alone.

The powerful influence exerted by human leaders upon the people was recognised by the prophet Samuel (1 Samuel 8). When the people asked for a leader, he resisted, in part, because he knew that kings, in addition to their heavy and often selfish demands upon the

people, would become a middleman between the people and their God. Rather than each Israelite being directly accountable to God, future generations would be raised and enmeshed within a culture heavily driven and defined by the policies and ethos of their human king.

He determined, among other things, who was educated and how, whose businesses were best poised to flourish, the identity and nature of the judiciary and ultimately who determined foreign policy. This latter affected not only the economic trade relations, but even the influence of foreign cults, as quite often, a dominant empire determined the religion of its allied vassal kingdoms.

Kings thus had significant power to influence people’s spiritual lives, for good or ill.

So, in a day when power and authority is linked with corruption and abuse, both in postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion and in the media scandals of politicians, bankers and church leaders, how are we to develop both leaders and a concept of leadership which reflects Christ? Certainly his servant-leadership comes to mind as a counter-intuitive and perennially challenging commentary on the purpose and mode of leadership.

But, in many ways, Christ’s mission feels removed from ours. He came to atone for the sins of the world, to reconcile the Jews and Gentiles, to do things we cannot ourselves do. We, on the other hand, face things that did not exist in his day, including global warming and green issues, disputes about gender in leadership, multiple views of sexuality and transgender, pornography, online ethics, social media, nuclear power, international terrorist networks, sex trafficking, narcotics, and a host of other modern problems. What would Christ-like leadership look like today?

3

Transmission In this issue, we explore leadership in the twenty-first century, both from outside and within the private life.

What can we learn from arenas as diverse as nature, the pope, and sport, and how might this impact the leadership we model in our conferences and churches?

In our first article, ‘Developing Leaders’, Martyn Snow probes the nature of leadership needed within a church rife with reports of decline. He provocatively asks,’ Should Christian leaders be trained in business schools or in monasteries?’ Though his answer is neither, he goes on to draw lessons from both and postulates three advantages the church has to offer in developing leaders. Initially, he considers the ubiquitous separation of church leaders from community, whether experienced in their training, or within their subsequent ministries.

Here, Snow considers the virtues of the experience of character developed in community, and especially in the setting of the church. Secondly, he looks at Luke 9 and Jesus’ own missional apprenticeship model, which incorporates both mentorship and learning on the job.

Finally, he considers how leaders can benefit from wider (non-church) environments.

James Catford attunes our gaze to the inner workings of leaders and how they find the fuel for their engines. In ‘Spirituality and Leadership: The Inner Life of the Public Leader,’ he takes on the prevailing assumptions that the personal lives of leaders are immaterial to the decisions and policies which they take. Dispelling the myth of ‘business is business,’ Catford challenges leaders with some of the core questions of life, and bring insights for growing the inner lives of leaders and making them, as Willard said, ‘teachers of nations.’ In so doing, he draws out the need for both church and secular leaders to learn from each other.

With ‘An Effective Leader: Pope Francis Servant and Reformer,’ Austen Ivereigh gives us a case study of a leader who is one of the most popular and influential popes of modern times. In charting Pope Francis’ meteoric rise, he finds several principles behind his approach to leading a major reform in the Catholic Church. Ivereigh looks at the Pope’s relentless pursuit of change, most prominently in reidentifying the church with the margins of society. He notes that it is the mercy of God which draws, and the law which informs our response to mercy, which incidentally, coincides with the presentation of the 10 commandments as a response to God’s salvation in the exodus, not as a prerequisite for relationship with him.

Finally, he considers the plague of ‘spiritual worldliness’ which he feels has infested the church and most especially its leadership. He looks at the freedom of the Holy Spirit to guide the church in spontaneous acts of warmth and love which demonstrate the genuineness of a church led and controlled by the Spirit – a wind whose origins and end no one can discern, but whose effect is undeniably felt by all.

Natalie Collins considers the messages which church platforms convey about their views of God and men and women. She addresses the particular issue of women 4

leaders in the church, and the struggles struggles they have in gaining recognition to speak. She observes how this is a salvation issue for some, and looks at some of the issues involved in including women on the platform.

In Project 3:28: The Campaign for Gender Justice, she brings squarely into the spotlight how the church presents, trains leaders and defines leadership.

Tim Harle brings to the question of leadership, not only his insights as a geologist, but also those of psychology and theology as well. In a creative and insightfully different take, he digs some insights out of everything from the compost bin to the rainforest in Contemplating Compost: Leadership Lessons from the Natural World.

The post-Newtonian world of self-organisation and emergence from chaos provides a challenge to the cause-and-effect world which provides the control that leaders often crave. Harle contends that both are needed – a chaordic world – as necessary environments and tools for creativity and change, respectively. From the disturbance needed for health seen in flowing rivers, to the ‘downward’ growth seen in times of trouble and dissatisfaction with the status quo to the cycle of seasons of outward and inward growth, Harle finds much in nature to help balance our views of the ways healthy leadership should look and reorienting both our approach to and evaluation of it.

Finally, we turn to how leadership is involved in a particular issue: sports and the church. In ‘Leadership and Virtue in Sport,’ Paul Bickley shows how the impact of moral failure in sport celebrities demonstrates not only their influential status, but the warped view we often have of sport in modern society. Paul Bickley examines the nature of professional sport, i.e., sport for the purpose of viewing rather than participating. In contrast, he raises the idea of ‘play’ as a non-requisite, but ordered activity which lends something of the transcendent to human life – an ability to experience something disconnected to our typical work and family lives. In this sense, it reveals something of what we miss in this lack of play – the theology of our humanness.

Eschewing the moralist response as necessarily limited to the ‘suppression of vice’, Bickley points to a more positive leadership Christians can take both in their approach to sports in general and to athletes in particular.

In all these offerings, we find a concern for building into leaders a healthy sense of balance in their own lives and their need to learn from others. The Church should be the forum for this to be explored and demonstrated.

The virtues explored in this discussion are not simply a formula for a good leader, but for a vibrant, resilient and humble ... church, poised to demonstrate the love and wisdom of God to the world.

Summer 2015

Developing leaders

Martyn Snow Martyn Snow is the Bishop of Tewkesbury in the Diocese of Gloucester. He has a background in crosscultural mission.

Why does the church need leaders? Some may think this a strange question to ask. However, there are plenty of people in the church today who question the language of leadership. Even those of us (like me) who are happy with the language of leadership still think more work needs to be done to achieve clarity and agreement about what our leaders are called to be and to do at this moment in history. Only then can we start to think about how to develop the leaders of the future.

In 2014 the Church of England published what has become known as The Green Report.1 Chaired by Lord Green, the working group set out a new way of selecting candidates for senior leadership positions in the church.

However, from the moment it was published the report was mired in controversy and heavily criticised as a business-shaped approach to developing leaders. At the same time, damaging reports about the ethical practices of the bank which Lord Green had once chaired were published in the press. Such was the focus on The Green Report, bloggers and the church press largely ignored a theological reflection on Senior Church Leadership prepared by the Faith and Order Commission of the Church of England, which was published separately in 2015.2 Many other denominations are having similar debates, which suggests to me that there is something of a crisis of understanding of ministry and mission in today’s church. Some of this is about a loss of nerve – we hear so many stories of decline that we are quick to assume that we must be doing something wrong and quick to apportion blame. But some of it is about different understandings of church. Rowan Williams, the former

Archbishop of Canterbury, made it very clear which side of the debate he stood on: ‘it is about getting away from a view of the church that is very seductive and very damaging – and very popular.

This is the view that the church is essentially a lot of people who have something in common called Christian faith and get together to share it with each other and communicate it to other people “outside”. It looks a harmless enough view at first, but it is a good way from what the New Testament encourages us to think about the church – which is that the church is first of all a kind of space cleared by God through Jesus in which people may become what God made them to be (God’s sons and daughters), and that what we have to do about the church is not first to organise it as a society but to inhabit it as a climate or a landscape.’3 So are these visions mutually exclusive? Should Christian leaders be trained in business schools or in monasteries?

Or are the two approaches closer than we sometimes think? And what can local churches be doing to develop leaders in all parts of the church?

Here I offer a few reflections on the particular parts of the church’s tradition which I believe need to come to the fore at this moment in our history and how we might develop leaders in these particular areas. The theme linking these reflections is what Pope Francis called ‘a community of missionary disciples’4 – a church where everyone is involved in mission, shaped by the experience of community and led by wise stewards who follow God’s lead.

5

Transmission

Leaders of character who shape communities of character

NOTES 1. Talent Management for Future Leaders and Leadership Development for Bishops and Deans: A New Approach, available online at www.churchofengland. org/media/2130591/ report.pdf 2. Senior Church Leadership: A Resource for Reflection, available online at www.churchofengland. org/media/2145175/ senior%20church%20 leadership%20faoc. pdf 3. R Williams, ‘The Christian Priest Today’, a lecture given on 24th May 2004, available online at http://rowanwilliams. archbishopofcanter bury.org 4. Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel). A PDF version of this apostolic exhortation can be downloaded from http://w2.vatican.ca 5. JM Kouzes and BZ Posner, The Leadership Challenge (San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, 2002).

6. J Vanier, Community and Growth (2nd rev. edn; London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1989), pp. 26–7.

7. See GA Arbuckle, From Chaos to Mission: Refounding Religious Life Formation (London: Geoffrey Chapman 1996), p. 18.

8. E.g. http:// leeabbey.org or http://missional communities.co.uk

6

Few would argue with the thought that spiritual maturity is foundational to Christian leadership. But perhaps more than anything else at this moment in our history, we need to re-emphasise the importance of leaders who set an example in life and character.

Research into the characteristics that people look for and admire in leaders consistently shows that honesty, integrity and character come top of the list.5 Yes, we want our leaders to be inspiring, forward-looking and competent but all of these count for little if we don’t believe our leaders match their words with actions.

So how do we develop leaders of honesty and integrity with the resilience to cope with change and keep going in ministry over many years? At its most basic level this is about Christian formation in community. Jean Vanier, founder of the l’Arche communities has written what I would regard at the basic textbook on how character is shaped and formed in community. Community and Growth is a set of reflections on his own experience of living with people with developmental disabilities: ‘Community is the place where our limitations, our fears and our egoism are revealed to us. We discover our poverty and our weaknesses, our inability to get on with some people … While we are alone, we could believe we loved everyone. Now that we are with others, living with them all the time, we realize how incapable of loving we are … As all the inner pains surface, we can discover too that community is a safe place … we discover that we are loved by God in an incredible way. We are broken, but we are loved. We can grow to greater openness and compassion; we have a mission. Community becomes the place of liberation and growth.’6 This deep and profound experience of love shapes us. It is the only way we can be secure in who we are (nurture our identity), and it is only when we know this security that we can reach out in love to others and have hope for the future. I believe this is why Luke speaks of the first Christian community in such gushing terms (Acts 2.42–47). He wants us to see this community as an enactment of all Jesus taught about the Kingdom of God. The goal is not simply individuals saved “from this corrupt generation” (2.40) but individuals formed into a new community where they have space to become what God created them to be (to reiterate Rowan Williams words).

Many denominations have recognised this approach to forming leaders through residential training colleges. The experience of intense community, living alongside those you are also studying with, is deeply challenging but also rewarding. However, the problem comes when individuals are then launched into ministry in local churches where there is either no genuine expression of community, or the minister is put on a high pedestal and separated from other disciples. This approach to training implies that we can outgrow the need for community. We act as if the aim is to reach an idealised state of individual maturity, where the minister is given, in two or three years, all the resources needed to sustain them for the long-term.

Surely it is time we rediscovered the lifelong importance of community and the importance of leaders in every area of church life being formed in character as well as skills and knowledge. Those involved in leadership in their workplace need this character formation, just as those leading community projects. It is foundational to our discipleship and leaders are first and foremost disciples.

Practically this means exploring what it means for local churches to be communities of character, shaped by the story of God as well as the experience of being known, loved and celebrated by others. This is hard. The commitment to meet regularly with others requires real determination and creativity in the midst of busy lives, but there is no substitute in the lifelong journey of character formation. Ministers must lead by example – if we are not prepared to find the time for formation in community, then there is little point preaching about it. To a certain degree a staff team or leadership team can be ‘our community’, but this then necessitates paying attention to community life, i.e. not spending all our time doing business; creating an atmosphere for open and honest sharing, disagreement and mutual learning; praying for one another and supporting one another practically.

Leaders in mission who train others in mission Luke 9 is to my mind an extended study in training people for mission. It starts with the sending out of the twelve ‘to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal the sick’ (v. 2), i.e. do the work they have seen Jesus doing. This is the apprenticeship model of training. The twelve are to travel light and stay only where they are welcomed (just as Jesus did). Luke then tells us of the first rumblings of opposition to Jesus’ work (vv. 7–9).

The feeding of the five thousand (vv. 10–17) is an enacted parable – the twelve have offered themselves to God (they think of their offering as small and weak) but God blesses the offering, multiplies it and give it back to them to distribute to others. Verses 18–27 show that Peter and the other disciples have not understood the full implications of calling Jesus Messiah but this is no obstacle to involvement in mission (if we wait until we have all the answers sorted, we will never go out in mission). The transfiguration is part of the process of their eyes being opened to the true glory of Jesus. But this is an ongoing process of learning – they still have much to grasp about faith (vv. 37–43), suffering (vv. 43–45), humility (vv. 46–48), partnership (vv. 49–50), power (vv. 51–56) and about what it really means to persevere as a follower of Jesus (vv. 57–62).

These are all key to continuing the mission of Jesus. And now that the twelve have embarked on this journey of learning about mission, others can also be commissioned to multiply the work (10.1–24).

I think it is fair to say that we have yet to find a better way of training people for mission. Watching someone at work, having a go at it ourselves, reflecting on this experience with further input from the teacher – all of this correlates to what we now know about ‘learning cycles’ and faith development. But again this involves a degree of intentionality – apprenticeships require the

Summer 2015 leader to give time and attention to the learning process.

They also involve an appetite for risk – the apprentice will make mistakes and therefore needs to know at the outset that this is acceptable.

At the core of an apprenticeship in mission is the development of the leaders’ ability to read culture and context and discern where God’s Spirit is at work. This is where divine and human agency come together – it is the work of the Holy Spirit to open our eyes and often this happens as we observe our leaders and see them discerning God’s leadership and following.

The monastic communities provide an interesting model for this. Gerald Arbuckle points out that different religious communities have had different approaches to formation in community.7 He contrasts communities which were cloistered, where the focus is on predictability and stability, with the approach of friars who were formed ‘in context’, e.g. Franciscans who work among the poor, are formed in community with the poor.

Novitiates work alongside friars in education, community projects and local churches. Such communities have years of learning about these ‘formal apprenticeships’ and the wider church needs to pick up on this.

These first two themes – character and mission – have been interwoven in our own day, in a variety of approaches to ‘missional communities’.8 These are small groups that shape their life around intentional community and witness to those around them. I have been privileged to see how extraordinarily effective such missional communities are in developing new leaders. They provide a safe space for exploration and development of gifts as well as growth in knowledge and understanding.

However, this vision of a ‘community of missionary disciples’ is very different to the settled pastoral image of church of yesteryear and the question arises: how do we move from where we are now, to where we want to be? I believe this requires a particular approach to leadership and to the developing of new leaders.

Leaders as wise stewards who enable others to steward God’s gifts I find the imagery of stewardship the most helpful resource for a biblical approach to leadership (1 Cor. 4.1).

We are custodians, not owners; God is the primary leader of the church and the core task of leadership is discerning God’s call, walking ‘in step with the Spirit’ (Gal. 5.25) and equipping, resourcing, supporting and encouraging others to respond to that call (Eph. 4.12).

The language of stewardship, like all the language used in the New Testament about ministry, is borrowed from elsewhere. It implies good planning and management of resources. So we must search out wisdom and commit ourselves to the task of learning good stewardship. Some of this wisdom will lie in the world of management studies, business studies and other related fields. The process of learning will, of course, be a process of assimilation and transformation, where everything is critically assessed in the light of God’s leadership of the church. Jesus himself did this (Lk. 22.24–27).

Let me give two examples of my own engagement with leadership studies. First, whole systems working where writers such as Margaret Wheatley have taught me that, while we cannot know what the future will bring, we can prepare for it. We do this by attending to relationships – gathering people, involving them in decision-making, holding the attendant diversity and complexity, being prepared to live with a degree of messiness. These are all key skills if we are to build trust and so discern together how God is shaping the church of the future. Attending to relationships fits well with a Christian approach to community, while helping us deal with some of the resistance to close relationships. Its weakness arguably lies in playing down the role of sin and ‘the powers’ (collective decisions shaped by unhealthy group dynamics) and failing to address the limits of diversity.

Secondly, the field of risk analysis has taught me that any organisation needs to assess its appetite for risk in different areas of its work. So the church will have zero appetite for risk when it comes to protecting the vulnerable (core to our mission); but increasingly we need to have a high appetite for risk in the area of reimagining the structures of the church (which are neutral to our mission). So how do we shape the culture of the church such that we develop this appetite for risk in key areas? What are the critical shifts in behaviour which would bring about this cultural change? How do we measure and monitor such cultural evolution? We need leaders who are confident in addressing these questions.

Some of my learning in these areas has come through formal training courses. There are now a wide variety of such courses on offer, from short courses to postgraduate studies. The best of these equip leaders with the necessary skills to critically engage with learning from a variety of fields, reflect on their own experience of leading and being led, and so develop the ability to be stewards of God’s church.

However, much of my own learning has also come from spending time with leaders working in other areas. I have often chosen mentors and coaches who are not church leaders but are mature Christians exercising leadership in other fields. For a number of years I met weekly with a school head-teacher and a business leader to compare and contrast our leadership contexts and learn from one another. I would like to think that my own approach to leadership in the church has helped to shape their work as leaders in the world, as much as they have shaped me.

So I wonder if the vision of the church as a community of missionary disciples might provide three key strands of church leadership: character, mission and stewardship, which in turn allows us to think creatively about how we develop leaders. The process of development will focus on character shaped in community, mission apprenticeships and stewardship learnt through critical engagement with wider leadership studies. Holding these different strands together will be a complex task, but that in itself should place us where we need to be: on our knees in prayer and dependence on God.

7

Transmission

Spirituality and leadership: The inner life of the public leader

Truth be told, I haven’t read all the books that are on the market about leadership – it just feels that way.

I’ve been one minute managed, gone from good to great, found out who moved my cheese and ended up at the feet of Patrick Lencioni. Pass through any airport bookshop and you are likely to find me leafing through the pages of the latest business best-seller. Yes, that’s me with the carry-on bag blocking your way to the checkout.

James Catford James Catford is Bible Society’s Group Chief Executive.

During my career in commercial publishing I was responsible for several major biographies and autobiographies. This gave me access to some of the most remarkable leaders of our day, including politicians, sports personalities and members of the royal family. I was required to understand their private world and try to make some sense of it.

In one example I visited Jonathan Aitken in Belmarsh Prison outside London after he had been sensationally convicted of perjury in the biggest trial of its kind since Oscar Wilde. Sitting together in relative privacy, it was my job to ask him, as a former leading cabinet minister, why he had done it. His answer appeared later in his memoir Pride and Perjury1 and still remains a fascinating account of human frailty and redemption.

Both in commerce and during more than a decade leading a sizable non-profit charity, I’ve wrestled with the challenges of my own leadership. I’ve watched colleagues burnout or collapse under the weight of their moral failure. I’ve mentored younger leaders grappling with their work and with themselves. I’ve also experienced the loneliness of leadership and the burden it can be on friends and family alike.

8

However big our small our role, many people find themselves in leadership positions. It might be the leadership of a family, a small team, a church or a vast company. Of course, whether we actually provide leadership is another matter. Putting a label on someone doesn’t make them into that person, and many who call themselves leaders may not actually be exercising that gift. We all can think of examples of leaders who don’t actually lead.

Leadership from the core In recent years it has become fashionable to say that it is irrelevant who we are on the inside just as long as we do a good job. Faced with the prurient fascination for the private lives of leading celebrities, the understandable backlash has been to say that it’s none of our business what they do behind closed doors.

However, a clutch of global politicians, and even some well-known faces of the church today, suggests that when it comes to leaders this approach is not a good idea. Their example makes it ultimately untenable to say that it doesn’t matter what’s going on under the surface just so long as the impact is ethical.

We have paid a very high price for ignoring the simple and straightforward teaching of both Jesus and Paul on this matter. ‘A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit’, taught Jesus in his famous Sermon in the Mount (Mt. 7.18). Later he made much the same point when he said, ‘First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean’ (Mt. 23.26).

Summer 2015 Paul put so much stress on this that he admitted to being in agony as great as childbirth that ‘Christ is formed in you’ (Gal. 4.19). As many leaders will testify, eventually who we are on the inside will come out. As a result, a number of leading business schools now offer psychometric tests and high-end courses on what is known as ‘the dark side’ of leadership. Essentially they are asking ‘who are you when no one is watching?’

If the definition of ‘spiritual’ is everything that is not physical, then the interior journey of the leader is deeply spiritual. It takes us to the heart of what it is to be human with all our dark side and frailties. If we are to be successful at it, then it will require a deeply reflective life and lifestyle.

In my observations and mentoring, the classic spiritual disciplines of silence and solitude are the most essential part of true leadership. ‘Spend more time leaning back in your chair and looking out of the window’ is the counterintuitive advice I often give the upwardly mobile and hard-driven executive. The deliberate habit of slowing down is both the hardest and yet most rewarding part of the leader’s daily routine.

Sometimes I even suggest to leaders that the most courageous and valiant act that they can do is to switch off their laptop and iPhone and to go to bed. Why? Because in doing so we are consciously trusting God for the outcome of our leadership. Try it yourself and learn what it feels like to quit running the universe for a while.

All about character Victorian social thinker John Ruskin considered how such an inner morality played out in the wider world of his day. A modern take on what he said would be to ask what a business person, or merchant as he called them, would be willing to die for.

In other professions, a captain would expect to go down with their ship and a surgeon would be willing to sacrifice their own life while treating their soldiers on the battlefield. Even a pastor prefers martyrdom to preaching error. So what would a business leader of a bank or insurance company be prepared to die for?

The answer goes to the heart of what drives business leaders today. Sadly, from fixing the Libor exchange rate to mis-selling financial products, the merchant has not always demonstrated impressive inner virtue.

Surely the role of business is to provide for the community. It is to offer the highest quality product for the widest number of people at the best possible price.

Yet such virtue is often lacking. Instead the assumption is very often simply ‘to make money’. Of course, it might be wrapped up in the good motivation to provide for your family, but this can disguise a worrying lack of virtue and moral character.

‘Business is business’, said the philosopher Dallas Willard when suggesting that it is often an expression used by someone who is about to do something they know to be wrong. With a shrug of the shoulders and a sigh of

resignation, they preface a corrupt act or dodgy decision with the justification ‘well, business is business.’

But business is never just business and all leaders, deep down, know this. It’s about the people we are leading

Putting a label on someone doesn’t make them into that person, and many who call themselves leaders may not actually be exercising that gift and the customers we are serving. It’s also about the physical environment that we are leaving behind us.

As Ruskin puts it, the leader is responsible not only for the product of his business but also for the welfare of those he leads: ‘... into these two functions, requiring for their right exercise the highest intelligence, as well as patience, kindness, and tact, the merchant is bound to put all his energy, so for their just discharge he is bound, as soldier or physician is bound, to give up, if need be, his life, in such way as it may be demanded of him.’2 What of today? ‘The era of market triumphalism’, wrote Michael Sandel in What Money Can’t Buy, ‘has coincided with a time when public discourse has been largely empty of moral and spiritual substance’.3 In such a context leadership is a high calling. It requires a profound grasp of who we are and what makes us tick.

Often in the most difficult of circumstances, it presses down on us and challenges the quality of our character and how we are formed spiritually.

Pastors as teachers of the nations For the follower of Christ, leadership is one of the primary places where our inner discipleship to Christ is being fashioned. As a result, all this talk of how to lead ‘out there’ in business, the academy, the social sector and non-profit charities should be of primary concern for the church.

It’s not that we wait until we get home and set down our leadership responsibilities before we engage in the ‘spiritual stuff’ of becoming more like Jesus; it’s right there in the busy-ness of how we lead in the boardroom, the classroom and on the shop floor. Much of this has been lost on the church which explains why leaders often find it hard to cross over into the culture of a church that takes so little interest in their daily concerns.

NOTES 1. J Aitken, Pride and Perjury (London: HarperCollins, 2000).

2. J Ruskin, ‘The Roots of Honour’, originally published in 1860. This lecture is available online at www.ourcivilisation. com/smartboard/ shop/ruskinj/last/ chap1.htm 3. M Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (London: Penguin, 2013), p.

202.

4. D Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (New York: HarperOne, 2009); Personal Religion, Public Reality?: Towards a Knowledge of Faith (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2010).

5. Willard, Personal Religion, p. 193.

6. Ibid., p. 200.

7. Ibid., p. 209.

8. Ibid., p. 209. Dallas Willard’s emphasis.

9. Ibid., p. 211.

At least in some Christian traditions the ‘general confession’ towards the start of the service touches on the realities of leadership today. Ask any leader and they will tell you that sin and failure are commodities that they recognise all too well in themselves and in others. The trouble is that the rest of the service, and the pastoral support of the church minister, can be woefully inadequate to deal with the considerable burden of leadership as it is widely experienced.

This was once my own experience when, as a young executive, I found that my faith was increasingly unable 9

Transmission to carry the weight of the responsibilities that I now had. What seemed so simple and satisfying as a student was no longer sufficient for the harsh reality of a secular workplace. I felt increasingly lost and decided that it was better for everyone if I quit the church for good.

Then, in a retreat centre in the summer of 1997, I bumped into Dallas Willard. Fifteen years later his book Knowing Christ Today (published in the UK as Private Religion, Public Reality) put into print some of the early thinking that he first shared with me then.4 His concern was to see pastors as ‘teachers of the nations’ and provocatively asked ‘who is to bring the knowledge that will answer the great life questions that perplex humanity?’5

leadership is a high calling. It requires a profound grasp of who we are and what makes us tick In recognising the church as ‘a familiar social reality’ that continues to have a ‘massive public presence in the world’, Dallas Willard saw its leadership role in society.6 In this context ‘pastors for Christ teach the “nations” by declaring the presence of the kingdom everywhere and by pointing out the availability of eternal life now in the kingdom of God’.7 Dallas Willard would often say that ‘discipleship is for the sake of the world’’ not just the church.8 Here leadership in the church and leadership outside come together. Leaders in both spheres desperately need each other. The pastor needs the ‘secular leader’ to take the kingdom of God way beyond the confines of the church door. Meanwhile, the leader in society needs the Christian leader to ‘guide disciples into their place in the world and show them how to “exercise dominion in life through one man, Christ Jesus”’.9 That’s leadership.

Coaching in Christlikeness This applies as much to the office as it does to the laboratory, farm, schoolroom, media studio, sports world, fine arts, government and the academy. Church, for Dallas Willard, is to be a school of love. We are to coach the leaders of nations in how to live well; to coach them for Christ.

For Dallas Willard, leadership and virtue are routed through the historic teaching of the Church about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The formation of Christlike character is an essential part of this and the role of the church is to teach leaders how to live life deeply and well, right in front of the people they lead and in the glare of public scrutiny.

For pastors to do this fully, they will listen a lot and speak comparatively little. They will go and meet leaders in their own contexts, perhaps over lunch where they work. And they will understand at a fundamental level that failure is often the primary teacher of how to lead better.

10

Other ways to support leaders include forming small groups where they can discuss in confidence their leadership challenges. If necessary the pastor can facilitate these, but the answers should come from the group. One church I know has asked groups of professionals from the law or the medical world to write up their own concise leadership charter. Each profession will be different, but they will share some common principles.

Supporting the spouse and family of the leader is another important way that the church can strengthen the inner life of the public person. In some circumstances the family may be cash rich but time poor. They may feel isolated and unable to commit to being in church at set times and to perform in certain ways.

While some leaders are only too willing to pick up similar roles in their local church, I have found it hugely helpful at times not to be asked to continue my day job into the evenings and weekends. It’s not that we are lacking in commitment but how would the vicar feel if they were routinely required to minister themselves 24/7?

Much needs to be done to recover the idea of the pastor as the ‘cure of souls’ in a local church context. They themselves have needs concerning how to be better leaders themselves. Here again there is much to learn from each other as we intentionally open our lives to each other with honesty, trust, forgiveness and grace.

With fellow leaders we can learn from the leadership style of Jesus, the best leader who ever walked the planet.

Could we see a day when leaders both inside and outside the church are mutually supportive of each other? Kneeling, praying, laughing and learning, as the first three verses of 1 Peter 5 puts it, how to ‘Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, watching over them—not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock’ (vv. 2–3).

Summer 2015

An effective leader: Pope Francis servant and reformer So dramatic has been the impact of Francis’s leadership of the Catholic Church in just two years that The Economist believes the Pope should be studied in Harvard Business School alongside famous ‘turnaround CEOs’ such as Steve Jobs who reversed the fortunes of their organisations.

Austen Ivereigh Austen Ivereigh is a Roman Catholic journalist, author, commentator and campaigner. His biography of Pope Francis, The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope, was published by Allen & Unwin in 2014.

In 2014, Fortune magazine put the Pope in the top spot of its 50 greatest world leaders, for having ‘electrified the Church and attracted legions of non-Catholic admirers by energetically setting a new direction’. Time magazine was one of many to declare him Person of the Year, an accolade not accorded to the immensely popular John Paul II until 16 years into his pontificate. By that firstanniversary mark, March 2014, Francis graced the covers of Rolling Stone, Esquire, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Fortune among many others, including – remarkably – the gay magazine The Advocate. Alongside biographies and studies of his papacy, Francis has already generated books seeking to capture the lessons of his leadership, a concept understood (as did Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric) as the ability to articulate a vision and get others to carry it out.1 The accolades from the high citadels of cultural and economic liberalism are all the more remarkable because they were being awarded to a man whose critiques of western elites, capitalism and individualism were as relentless as they were devastating. This, after all, was a pope who at his inauguration in March 2013 had defined his own leadership in terms of radical service with an option for the poor:

‘Let us never forget that authentic power is service, and that the pope, too, when exercising power, must enter ever more fully into that service which has its radiant culmination on the Cross. He must be inspired by the lowly, concrete, and faithful service that marked Saint Joseph and, like him, he must open his arms to protect all of God’s people and embrace with tender affection the whole of humanity, especially the poorest, the weakest, the least important, those whom Matthew lists in the final judgment on love: the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and those in prison (cf.

Matthew 25:31–46). Only those who serve with love are able to protect!’

Without altering a single core Catholic Church doctrine – which a pope is not at liberty to do – Francis had achieved what had seemed impossible before his election: to speak to the heart of contemporary western culture. The Time article struggled with this apparent contradiction, eventually concluding that he must be a masterful operator. New York cardinal Timothy Dolan is frequently asked who is ‘behind’ Francis, as if there were some master strategist or PR firm operating in the shadows. (The idea makes those who know the Pope laugh out loud: not only does Francis not have a PR strategy, the Vatican press office is usually the last to find out about his interviews.)

Yet what draws the world to Francis is precisely the opposite: as the Financial Times noted, Francis ‘has a sincerity and authenticity that no world leader can match’.2 Francis’s actions, words, and gestures have awoken in western culture a dim, often unconscious, yet powerful memory of someone once loved but since lost.

11

Transmission As the headline over a column in the Washington Post expressed it: ‘Like Francis? You’ll Love Jesus.’3 Francis’s ‘secret’ is none other than a radical identification with Jesus Christ, the fruit of a lifetime’s immersion in contemplating Scripture and discerning spirits in the

Pope Francis has a clear vision of reform and he knows how to get there NOTES 1. On his leadership: C Lowney, Pope Francis: Why He Leads the Way He Leads (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2013), and JA Krames, Lead With Humility: 12 Leadership Lessons from Pope Francis (New York: AMACOM, 2014). There are three detailed biographies in English: E Piqué, Pope Francis: Life and Revolution. A Biography of Jorge Bergoglio (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2014); P Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) and my own The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope (London: Allen & Unwin, 2014; paperback September 2015). See also JL Allen, The Francis Miracle: Inside the Transformation of the Pope and the Church (Des Moines, IA: Time Inc., 2015) and (Cardinal) W Kasper, Pope Francis’s Revolution of Tenderness and Love (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2015).

2. ‘The remarkable figure of Pope Francis’, Financial Times, 29 December 2013.

3. E Tenety, ‘Like Francis? You’ll love Jesus’, Washington Post, 11 December 2013.

4. W Kasper, Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life (New York: Paulist Press, 2013), ch. 1.

12

manner of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order to which Francis belongs. What is unusual is the way he combines this radical commitment to God’s will with a once-in-a-generation capacity for governance.

Not only does he have a clear vision of reform – that the Catholic Church needs to be purged of all worldliness in order to re-focus on its mission of presenting Jesus Christ to the world – but he knows how to get there, how to build the relationships and to model the changes, how to prioritise and to enable. He has learned to consult, to include outside voices and to build consensus; yet he is not afraid to take the tough decisions himself and carry the weight of them. Like all great leaders, he has a phenomenal capacity for living in tension, waiting until the moment is right – which in his case, means when he receives a prompting of the Holy Spirit. Once the way is clear, he moves ahead like a bulldozer, relentlessly focussed on his objective, and notoriously impervious to pressure to change course.

Centre and periphery Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who was named head of the Argentine province of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) in 1973 at the tender age of 36, has always had an understanding of reform as spelled out in Yves Congar’s landmark 1950 text, True and False Reform in the Church, which John XXIII had by his bedside when he called the Second Vatican Council. Congar’s study of reform movements in church history – some of which had led to greater zeal and holiness, and succeeded in uniting the Catholic Church, while others had spun off into squabbling and division – led him to conclusions that Bergoglio has closely absorbed.

First is that all authentic reform in the Church begins at the margins – Jesus in Galilee, among the fishermen and the shepherds – and involves the ‘centre’ opening itself to, and allowing itself to be shaped by, ‘the periphery’. Second, that it does not question core church teaching and tradition, which in the case of the Catholic Church means taking for granted the Eucharist, Marian devotion, a male priesthood, and so on. True reform therefore always involves innovating within, not against, tradition. Third, the purpose of all true reform is pastoral, in other words, is concerned with bridging the gap between God and humanity, leading people into relationship with God through prayer, parishes, sacraments and so on. The criterion of true reform is what eases that return; if a reform has another

objective – modernisation, say, or democratisation – it suggests that the objective of the reform is to conform the Catholic Church to the world, rather than better equipping the church to evangelise the world.

Francis’s reforms obey these criteria. The changes he is bringing about in church governance involve creating greater fluidity between centre and periphery, Rome and the local Church, overturning Vatican centralism. Among his first moves was to name an advisory council of mostly developing-world cardinals, the so-called C-9, and put them in charge of restructuring the Roman Curia. Francis sees the C-9 as key to his governance reform; as he puts it, ‘the beginning of a Church with an organization that is not just top-down but also horizontal’.

Meanwhile, the College of Cardinals itself is assuming a role in governance of the universal Church similar to that of a senate, as in the pre-Reformation era. Over two-day meetings in February 2014 and February 2015, known as consistories, Francis has asked the cardinals to deliberate on major questions: admission to the sacraments for the remarried in the first, and the structural reform of the curia in the second. His creation of new cardinals in both consistories reveals the future direction he wants for the college: to correct the eurocentric imbalance by reducing the number of curial cardinals and amplifying the presence of poor countries; among the new 2015 intake, for example, were a large number from poor, far-flung places such as Tonga and Myanmar.

The third instrument of collegiality is the most farreaching of all – a new model of synod. Francis is converting the synod from a predictable Vaticancontrolled gathering into a powerful instrument of universal church governance, such that the pastoral realities of the local Church can be brought to bear on questions of doctrine and discipline.

Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, whom Francis named to take charge of the reforms, said in June 2013 that the pope was looking for ‘a dynamic, permanent synod, not as a structured organism, but as an action, like an osmosis between center and periphery’. Francis wants the synod to have real deliberative power as in the councils of the early centuries of Christianity, a body outside and above the Curia, accountable not just to the pope but also to the bishops.

The idea is to embed permanently in the Church the dynamic of Vatican II – bringing to bear on church doctrine the pastoral needs and realities of the People of God, in order that the priests and pastors do not become pharisees, and that church teaching and practice remain free of legalism. The first synod process – which began in October last year and will conclude in October this year – is looking at the vexed question of how to integrate into church life those who are estranged from the Church because of divorce, while upholding Jesus’s clear teaching about the indissolubility of marriage.

Restoring mercy, refocussing on mission Ever since a direct encounter with God’s mercy in a confessional in October 1953 left him convinced he

Summer 2015 would be a priest, Jorge Mario Bergoglio has been certain that conversion begins in such an experience, which it is the Catholic Church’s job to offer. The word for merciful in Latin, misericors, contains cor, meaning heart, and miseri, meaning the poor – the suffering, the sinners, those who yearn. The notion that God, the all-powerful Creator, is concerned with the distress of individuals, binding their wounds and time and again forgiving their sins, transcends human imagination and thought, and can only be ‘known’ through experience.

Francis is making the restoration of mercy the key to evangelization through what he calls the ‘Samaritan Church’. Under Francis, charity – the demonstration of mercy – is not a separate activity from evangelisation.4 His conviction is that the Catholic Church has spoken too much, laid down too many laws, and relied too much on the brilliance of its own arguments, rather than offering people the actual experience of God. It is as if Christians have reversed the proper order, offering the truth of Christianity without the experience of mercy – tying Jesus up in the sacristy, as he once memorably put it, and not letting him out. Yet without offering God’s mercy the truth of Christianity will just be another abstract doctrine. The woman caught in adultery and forgiven by Jesus in John 8, he told a retreat in Buenos Aires a few months before being elected Pope, would not have sinned again, ‘for whoever encounters such great mercy cannot depart from the law. It’s what follows’.

In order to model this focus on God’s mercy, he visits ‘places of pain’ – prisons, drug addiction centers, homes for the disabled – on his trips, while spending a large part of his time in St. Peter’s Square at the Wednesday general audiences with the elderly, disabled and homeless, such that the traditional 15-minute papal address has become a part of a much broader teaching of actions and gestures.

In a society marked by relativism and religious indifference, the temptation for Christians is to hunker down, raise barriers and focus on itself, becoming consumed by internal politics and bureaucracy and emphasising the law. Francis sees this as a temptation – one that guarantees the continued shrinking of the Christian Church – and the very specific sickness of the Catholic Church in recent times.

His answer is a relentless outward focus, asking Catholics to choose (as he put it on the eve of the conclave) between a ‘self-referential’, ‘worldly’ church that lives from its own light, and a missionary, evangelising church more closely identified with those on the margins, offering concrete acts of mercy that allow God to convert hearts. Hence he returns, time and again, in his teaching documents and in his speeches, to the culture change he wants to see, using striking phrases: a church that is poor and for the poor; priests who smell of sheep, not of the sacristy; a church that is a nurse not a policeman, a battlefield hospital rather than a customs house.

There are ‘two ways of thinking and of having faith’, he told the cardinals in February 2015. ‘We can fear to lose the saved and we can want to save the lost.’ In the

same homily he contrasted ‘the thinking of the doctors of the law, which would remove the danger by casting out the diseased person, and the thinking of God, who in his mercy embraces and accepts by reinstating him and turning evil into good, condemnation into salvation and exclusion into proclamation’. Thus, he wants the synod not to focus just on how to improve preparation and support for marriage, but on how the Church can reach out to those who have suffered marital breakdown.

Pope Francis places the papacy not at the service of the institution of the Catholic Church but of those Jesus came to serve and save Combatting spiritual worldliness; creating spaces for the Holy Spirit to act One of the most bewildering aspects of Francis’s papacy is the way he reserves some of his harshest words for bishops, priests and Vatican officials. His immense popularity in the world beyond the Catholic Church contrasts with the grumbling about him in Rome, where some complain that he seldom has a good word to say about his own officials. Francis regards the greatest temptation to befall the Catholic Church is that of ‘spiritual worldliness’, in which the gospel is presented a way that is confused with interests that are not those of the gospel. There is one quote that repeats itself like a mantra throughout Bergoglio’s writings and homilies over 40 years, from Henri de Lubac’s 1953 Méditations sur l’Église, which describes spiritual worldliness as ‘the greatest danger, the most perfidious temptation’ for religious people. Hence his constant complaints at careerism, clericalism, and the seeking of wealth and privilege, his stressing that the Catholic Church is not a non-governmental organisation but a love story, his placing the papacy not at the service of the institution but of those Jesus came to serve and save.

Pope Francis sees his role, in fact, as purging the Catholic Church of spiritual worldliness in order to create spaces for the Holy Spirit to act. One of his primary lessons is that where the Holy Spirit is present, there will be constant surprises, joy, and a fearlessness in speaking out. Francis embodies this confidence in his own way of communicating – in direct, unfiltered, spontaneous interviews, in casting aside prepared texts in order to speak off the cuff, in rising quickly out of his chair in order to embrace others in acts of great warmth and tenderness. He has discerned the need for parrhesia, a Greek word that can be variously translated as apostolic courage, prophetic directness, or bold proclamation.

Parrhesia is what he called for in his famous brief remarks to the cardinals in March 2013 that persuaded many to elect him. It stems from the Pope’s conviction that the Holy Spirit is in charge of the church, and that his task is to allow it to course more freely by opening up new spaces – building bridges and unblocking channels.

13

Transmission

Project 3:28: The campaign for gender justice Setting the scene

Natalie Collins Natalie Collins is a gender justice specialist. She speaks and writes on understanding and ending gender injustice and is an experienced consultant in the areas of domestic abuse and violence against women.

Visit www. sparkequip.org

Christian conference season is almost upon us. Whether camping in a field or booking into a bed and breakfast and arriving on-site with clean hair and fresh clothing, thousands of Christians will spend various parts of the summer making their way to Shepton Mallet, Keswick or Kettering. The brightest and the best of the Christian conference speaking circuit will share witty anecdotes and wisdom with the gathered throng. Yet the brightest and the best seem to be predominately white men (and their wives).

Two years ago I became so interested in what has been described as the ‘pale, stale, male’ Christian platform situation, that in partnership with Christian blogger and activist, Helen Austin, I collated the amount of men and women on the national Christian platform. Gathering data from all the national events we were aware of, we spent a couple of evenings gathering and ordering the data.

What we found was that only 25 per cent of the overall Christian platform was female. Not only that but often women who spoke at events were married to men who were speaking at the events; sessions led by women often focussed on subjects perceived as ‘women’s issues’, e.g. parenting, self-esteem, feelings, etc.

Some were surprised by the data. Others defended the situation, with some conference organisers commenting on the difficulty in finding competent female speakers.

Pleas of ‘political correctness gone mad’ and ‘we want the best speaker, it shouldn’t matter if they are male’ were made from various corners of the church.

14

Interestingly, although some of the events had a complementarian theology, believing that women shouldn’t lead in certain roles, almost all events had some female speakers (or had done in the past) suggesting that the lack of women on the platform was not about theological conviction. Other events had a strong egalitarian approach, believing theologically that women can have any role, yet the gender of their speakers did not reflect women as equal to men.

Seeking gender parity Helen and I began talking with other interested people about the situation; theologians Dr Paula Gooder and Dr Steve Homes, Wendy Beech Ward (who ran Spring Harvest for 15 years), Rachel Jordan (National Mission and Evangelism Advisor for the Church of England), Hannah Mudge (feminist blogger) and Vicky Walker (communications consultant). We began considering what it would take to create a gender balanced Christian platform. Out of these conversations was borne Project 3.28.

Project 3:28 found its name in Galatians 3.28: ‘There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ As Christians we live out a redeemed reality, our identity found in Christ, not in our gender, ethnicity or employment status. Yet, this side of eternity our lives are always going to be shaped by the intersection of oppression and privilege that each of us experience. The church is not immune from prejudice and discrimination.

We may serve a God who said, ‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials

Summer 2015 exercise authority over them. Not so with you’ (Mt 20.25–26). Yet the use of power within the church since its alliance with the Roman Empire has always been more reflective of the emperor than our risen Lord who saved humanity by giving up all power and dying for us.

The purpose of Project 3:28 is to challenge the UK church to do better on gender justice. It is almost guaranteed that Christian conferences will have a higher proportion of female attendees, yet most will have a much higher proportion of male speakers. God made us male and female, and unless we have both male and female on the platform we are not truly modeling the redeemed reality of Galatians 3.28.

Responding to criticisms of Project 3.28 Although there has been lots of support for improving the gender balance at Christian conferences, we’ve also had criticism. Some of the challenges to Project 3:28 include: ‘We don’t want to have a platform based on political correctness, we want the best speakers. End of.’

Unless you believe that men are better at public speaking than women, the ‘best’ is based on a system which unfairly disadvantages women. This is not about being politically correct, it’s about hearing from a broader spectrum of the church, which can only be a positive thing.

‘Quotas to get more female speakers are unfair, what if there are really good male speakers that get missed because of them?’

There have been lots of assumptions that quotas are the only approach to addressing an unbalanced platform.

However, until we unpick the many and varied reasons why the imbalance exists, quotas will not address the core reasons why the Christian platform isn’t equal. At present it’s already unfair; there are really good female speakers who are being missed, and we need to address this. There are only so many conference slots and men will have to lose some of those if women are to be fairly represented.

‘Christianity isn’t about balance, it’s about preaching the gospel. This issue isn’t about the gospel.’

For many women (and men) it has been the Church’s treatment of women that caused them to reject Jesus.

For many feminists, their discovery of feminism led to their rejection of Christianity due to their experience of the church oppressing and silencing women. For those people, gender is a salvation issue. If the gospel isn’t good news to women gifted with the ability to speak and preach, then it isn’t really good news.

‘Projects like this cost loads of money that could be better spent helping the poor.’

Project 3:28 has received no funding and I run the project as a volunteer.

What are we doing?

A year after producing the first statistics, we produced a second set which built on data from the first set of statistics. We have seen a 9 per cent increase across the UK Christian platform, with women accounting for 34 per cent of the platform in 2014.

the purpose of Project 3:28 is to challenge the UK church to do better on gender justice We have seen a level of commitment from some conference organisers to create a more balanced platform, Soul Survivor have implemented a short talk programme for first-time speakers and the Holy Trinity Brompton Leadership Conference had a marked increase in women speaking on the main stage in both 2014 and 2015.

Other conferences have been less forthcoming, though increases were seen between 2013 and 2014 in some conferences, though from the data it suggests this may have been incidental rather than intentional.

We have produced an in-depth paper, which uses a socioecological model to examine the many barriers women face in having equal access to the Christian platform. By articulating the many barriers, we can create an action plan for changing the situation.

We are in the early stages of developing an online database of female speakers. By creating a comprehensive, fully searchable resource for conference organisers, we hope to make it easier for them to access speakers. We need quite a lot of funding to make this happen and are considering crowdfunding the project.

What can you do as church leader?

There is much that you can do! Women and girls need opportunities and role models. Can you be intentional about encouraging women into teaching/speaking positions? Do you offer leadership training for those who might be interested? Do you consider the particular barriers women may be facing in pursuing a leadership call?

In your children’s work do you use resources that only show men and boys from within the Bible and across church history, or are you also explicit about the women and girls who were leaders? In my Anglican church, a nine-year-old girl made the offhanded comment, ‘But only boys can be vicars can’t they?’ We have had female vicars for over 20 years, but as the vicar and curates in our church are male, this child didn’t know. How can you make visible women leaders, not just to the children but to the adults in the church too?

How can you challenge sexism and prejudice in your church? It’s not only about women taking on leadership roles, but also about men taking on support roles. Do men make the tea, run the crèche, do the administration? If women are always busy doing the work to support the church in continuing they don’t have 15

Transmission the time, or any role models, to show that they are as called to preach and lead in the church.

What are the biggest barriers to women having equal representation on the platform?

Lack of experience Motherhood and being a wife can cause women to be unable to gain appropriate experience speaking publicly.

Often for most Christian couples there is an assumption that the husband’s career and prospects are of a higher priority. Once children are born this can be reinforced.

There are often large gaps in women’s experience and expertise due to life circumstances.

patriarchy is a principality and power and we must be praying against it and recognise the allpervasive way that it affects our lives Wives At some Christian events, the majority of women given speaking opportunities are married to male speakers at the event. This can create the perception that women have to ‘marry in’ to gain an invitation to speak.

Temptresses Women can be viewed with suspicion by male leaders and the fear of inappropriate or sexual contact taking place can leave male leaders reluctant to mentor or support women with a leadership calling.

Gender socialisation and neurosexism Women are often socialised to be less confident. Girls are placed in quite restrictive clothing and encouraged to play with contained toys like Sylvanians or Barbies. Boys are often encouraged to be more outgoing and terms like ‘bossy’ or ‘stroppy’ are rarely used to describe boys.

Alongside this, neurosexism can leave people assuming that it is differences between men and women’s brains that cause men and women to behave differently and be gifted differently.

Demand from conference attendees Alongside hoping to equip and support Christians, conferences are seeking to make money through running events. If enough Christians refused to attend events unless they were gender balanced, this would encourage conference organisers that this is a priority to their customers and action would be taken. While we continue to participate in unbalanced events, they will continue to be unbalanced.

Egalitarian in theory A lot of individuals and organisations are egalitarian in theory. They believe that biblically men and women are equal, but take little action to ensure women are given equal opportunities with men. We need to see individuals and organisations become egalitarian in practice, living out practical ways of encouraging women and ensuring there are equal opportunities.

Patriarchy In Genesis 3.16 we discover that male domination is one of the primary consequences of the Fall, ‘Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you.’ Since the Fall we have seen throughout the Bible and across history that women are oppressed by men. Domestic violence, female genital mutilation, female infanticide, pornographies, rape and sexual harassment are a reality for thousands of women. This oppression of women is found in the murder and rape of women and the disadvantage women face in every society in the world.

Though we live out a redeemed reality, where the curse of sin and death is broken in Jesus, we also live out a reality in which death and sin still affect us day in and day out.

Patriarchy is a principality and power and we must be praying against it and recognise the all-pervasive way that it affects our lives. Whether on the Christian platform or in the home, in our communities or through our churches, women-as-a-class are disadvantaged and we must do all we can to pray and act in ways which undermine the powers which seek to keep women oppressed. Because until the people who birth the nations are free, nobody is free.

Aggressive/leadership gifting Often when a woman has a leadership gifting in can be perceived as being aggressive due to societal constructs of femininity. Women who speak their mind or have an opinion can gain a reputation for being ‘scary’ whereas when men exhibit these behaviours it’s seen as a positive trait for leadership.

Rejecting all-male platforms While male Christians leaders accept the status quo, things are unlikely to change. Conference organisers need to know that male Christian leaders will turn down speaking slots if there aren’t enough women on the platform. Until egalitarian male leaders begin acting out the courage of their convictions, and prioritise a more balanced platform above their own opportunities, change is going to continue to be very slow.

16

********** If you would like to know more about Project 3:28 and get involved with the campaign, you can find further details on their website, www.project328.info

Summer 2015

Contemplating compost: Leadership lessons from the natural world

Tim Harle Tim Harle is Programme Leader for Sarum College’s MA in Christian Approaches to Leadership, and a Visiting Research Fellow at Bristol Business School. His latest publications include chapters in Moving on in Ministry (London: Church House Publishing, 2013) and Developing Leadership: Questions Business Schools Don’t Ask (London: Sage, 2015).

An everyday compost bin may seem a long way from popular images of leadership, but a bin in our garden provided an insight from the natural world about leadership. For two years, we had gradually filled one up with waste and leftovers, rejected and unloved vegetable matter. Last Spring, I tentatively removed the bottom flap. My garden fork dug into a marvellously vibrant organic growing medium. After a long period in the dark, this rejected matter provided a rich opportunity for new life. If leadership is about creating an environment where people can thrive, compost has something to tell us.

This wasn’t the first time I had found images from the natural world helpful: some years ago, I wrote an article for MBA students suggesting that the tangled web of a rainforest might provide a more sustainable model for our organisations than highly mechanised prairies.1 This current article collects insights from a number of disciplines: from my own background as a geologist studying ecosystems to insights from complexity theories and psychology. But we start with theology.

On being comfortably out of control I wonder how much our understandings of leadership are influenced by traditional readings of the first creation story in Genesis. A cosmic deity separates light from darkness, dry land from water. The project of controlling chaos and imposing order is even split into neat phases.

Contrast that with a view that welcomes the chaos and sees the creative potential of emergence.2 At an everyday level, we stare in wonder at huge termite mounds, with their ultra-efficient air conditioning and waste disposal systems. Yet they are the result of a self-organising system,

rather than a carefully planned construction project. If nothing else, a social media world of rapid dissemination of information encourages leaders to contemplate that they may not be in control. For leaders, the shift from a Newtonian world of cause-and-effect to a postNewtonian world of emergence and self-organisation is a profound one. Leaders traditionally crave control, and the psychological need for a secure base in times of uncertainty is one to which we shall return.

Frank Barrett combines insights from careers as a jazz musician and management professor. Citing such diverse authors as Meg Wheatley and Ralph Stacey, he writes how ‘systems are most creative when they operate with a combination of order and chaos’.3 Barrett refers to the description of systems as ‘chaordic’, a term coined by Visa’s founder, Dee Hock. The missiologist Alan Hirsch picks up the concept, referring to the need for a chaordic ecclesiology.4 Yet Newtonian images abound. A recent book, widely read in Methodist circles on both sides of the Atlantic, is explicit in discussing change: ‘The advantage of using a lever is that we can move things that otherwise we could never budge.’5 Contrast this cause-and-effect world with one where leaders co-create secure environments where people can explore and new things emerge.

Disturbance is vital for health The image of a deoxygenated stagnant pond reminds us that healthy ecosystems involve disturbance. Ponds with water flowing in and out survive and thrive. Yet how often do people crave to keep things as they are? The 17

Transmission prophets, from reformers such as Amos to today’s people of God with a message, are ignored, silenced, rejected.

NOTES 1. T Harle, (2007) ‘The Prairie and the Rainforest: Ecologies for Sustaining Organisational Change’, Business Leadership Review 4.3 (2007), pp. 1–15.

See also DK Hurst, The New Ecology of Leadership (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

2. See C Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003).

3. FJ Barrett, Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz (Boston, MA, Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), p.

70, italics original.

4. A Hirsch & T Catchim, The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice for the 21st Century Church (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2012), p.

218f.

5. R Schnase, Seven Levers: Missional Strategies for Conferences (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2014).

6. PL Steinke, Healthy Congregations: A Systems Approach (Herdon, VA: Alban Institute, 1996), pp. viii, 10.

7. Cited by J Lemmergaard & SL Muhr in Critical Perspectives on Leadership: Emotion, Toxicity, and Dysfunction (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2013), p. 20.

8. For S-curves, including the powerful image of the salmon leap demonstrating the potential of transitioning curves, see PP Robertson,

18

Writing from the discipline of family systems theory, Peter Steinke recognised the importance of this when considering what makes a congregation healthy. ‘Some organic processes promote growth through decay, shedding, and breakdown. Some organic growth is downward – a deepening, a rooting, a maturing process.’ He adds that, ‘A healthy congregation is one that actively and responsibly addresses or heals its disturbances, not one with an absence of troubles.’6 Dissatisfaction with the status quo is often a key element of leadership. Complex adaptive systems show an ability to adapt, to learn, through continuous feedback. There is a close link between learning and leadership. But learning can happen in surprising ways.

Consider two examples. First, Benedict’s rule indicates that the abbot must call the whole community together when facing a big decision, because the Lord may reveal the way to the youngest member. Secondly, the respected design consultancy IDEO emphasises the importance of reverse mentoring, where senior executives are mentored by younger staff.

For all the benefits the positive psychology movement has brought, one criticism of this approach is that it makes unrealistic expectations about people demonstrating happiness, especially in an organisational setting (are churches exempt from this criticism?). In a review of emotions in organisations, Hillary Efenbein noted that, ‘if we are happy all the time we will lose the evolutionary value of negative emotions’.7

‘Change and decay in all around I see’ Whatever the pastoral and cultural significance of HF Lyte’s hymn Abide with me, I am not sure how helpful his attitude to change has been. An Anglican bishop asked me what my work involved. On receiving the answer, ‘I work with people going through change’, the Lyteinspired word association was immediate. ‘Ah, change and decay’, came the response.

Such an attitude is disappointing, and hardly scriptural.

‘When you send your Spirit,they are created,and you renew the face of the ground’ (Ps. 104.30). ‘If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!’ (2 Cor. 5.17) ‘The one who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’

(Rev. 21.5). Hebrew and Christian scriptures contain insights into both continuous and discontinuous change, affecting all aspects of the earthly environment. For a faith centred around death and resurrection, we should be more hope-ful. As the opening reflection on compost shows, the rejected can bring new life. Those who have experienced redundancy, or other traumatic change to their lives, since the 2008 financial tsunami may recognise the scenario. Some may even be able to apply Jesus’ words to themselves: ‘unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds’ (Jn 12.24).

One image that I have found particularly helpful in addressing this situation is the S-curve. Slow growth (perhaps hidden at first) is followed by a main period of growth. But, as spring and summer give way to autumn and winter, growth slows and leads to hibernation or death. The S-curve operates at many levels: you can map both individuals and organisations, indeed whole civilisations over centuries, against this framework. The period between S-curves can be the most turbulent. Yet, harnessing our earlier thoughts about chaos, this may ultimately be a creative period.8

Stability and exploration Herds of wildebeest on the savannah have learned something over the evolutionary timescale. If they all stayed in the same place, they would use up their food source and die out. If they went looking for food individually, they would be picked off by their predators … and die out. To survive, the herd needs to balance stability and exploration. We find echoes in two different traditions: psychology and the Rule of St Benedict.

Attachment theory originated with John Bowlby’s work studying infants and parents. It has subsequently been extended to leadership, and the relationships between those deemed leaders and followers.9 A key concept, associated with Mary Ainsworth’s anthropological observations in East Africa, is that of the secure base.

A child thrust into the noisy environment of a birthday party may initially cling, often literally, to a parent or carer’s legs. Yet when the time comes to go home, the child cannot be found. Their natural inclination to explore kicks in: the attraction of toys, other children and/or cakes enables them to leave their secure base. Latest research shows that such secure bases may not be people: I have observed actuaries finding security in their profession amid the turmoil of a three-way corporate merger.

The Benedictine tradition describes something similar, especially though the vows of stability and conversion of life. A former Abbot of Ampleforth captures the balance between stability and exploration in describing the latter rule as, ‘a vow to change, to never remain still either in self-satisfied fulfilment or self-denying despair’.10 Note how this encapsulates what we have discussed above, both in terms of change and decay, and the link between disturbance and health.

It is vital to make explicit that a healthy team needs a mix of stability- and exploration-oriented people. There is often a social pressure to be more exploratory than we are, and to be more attached to people than our natural preference allows. But, as the parable of the sower reminds us, too rapid growth without depth of soil does not yield a sustainable crop (Mk. 4.3–20//). Or, as St Paul writes to the embryonic church in Corinth, they should be like a body with many parts (1 Cor. 12.12–31).

Boundary conditions The importance of leading from the edge should not surprise followers of one whose earthly life stretched from the back of an inn to outside the city walls at

Summer 2015 Golgotha. Indeed, Jesus often seemed more interested in engaging with those whom society deems peripheral, if not literally outcast.

Boundaries are fascinating places. They are places of exchange and discovery. Yet boundaries are also places where we build (literal or metaphorical) walls to define who is inside and who is outside. An organisation’s boundaries may be internal (silos) or external. Church leaders should pay attention not only to their physical boundaries, but also to their social media presence, where first encounters may occur.

Boundaries also form a key part of complexity theories, where sensitivity to initial conditions forms a crucial component. This is often referred to as the butterfly effect, after a pioneering conference paper by the meteorologist Edward Lorenz. He questioned whether the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could trigger a tornado in Texas: complex systems theory suggests an answer in the affirmative is possible. From a leadership perspective, we can see the importance of initial interactions with customers or co-workers.

Seashores lead us etymologically to liminal spaces. Note the parallel with the period between the top of one S-curve and the bottom of the next: liminal periods are times when old certainties have been left behind, but new rules aren’t yet in place. We encounter several examples in the scriptures. In Hebrew narrative and self-understanding, the wilderness wanderings can be seen in these terms, as can the exile: ‘By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion’ (Ps. 137.1) The Gospels record liminal times in the life of Jesus.11 For some, liminal spaces offer a period of creativity and exploration; for others, a frightening period of lost unknowingness. Once again we see links with our earlier discussion: to the formless void of the creation narrative and the secure base in times of uncertainty.

I should add a point about where boundaries are important. In pastoral and professional situations, maintaining appropriate boundaries plays a vital role in developing healthy relationships.

Small things matter Leadership is often associated with big things: sweeping visions, grand pronouncements, daring deals. Yet I have been increasingly struck how small things matter. Soon after hearing a visionary speech by the Chair of an international hotel group at the INSEAD business school in Fontainebleau, I had a mundane – but highly satisfying – exchange about ordering lunch at a hotel in Reading. It was only as I left that I realised that this hotel belonged to the same group I had heard about in France. This led me to apply the concept of fractals – repeating patterns seen at different levels – to leadership. The Chair and Receptionist had vastly different roles, but I noticed an underlying consistency in culture.

Like so many things we describe as discoveries, this is nothing new. Matthew’s Gospel includes a parable of a king who was questioned about a future of feeding

the hungry and clothing the naked. The listeners had no recollection of such actions. ‘The King will reply, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me”’ (Mt. 25.40). Leaders and others may, indeed, find themselves ‘entertaining angels unaware’ (Heb. 13.2, cf. Gen 18.1ff.).

Consistency in small things is deeply theological. One of my favourite academic journal articles comes from two scholars who, as far as I know, have no faith allegiance.

Yet the article’s subtitle, ‘the extra-ordinarization of the mundane’, resonates with an incarnational faith.12 Consistency has another important impact. It helps create a zone of psychological safety, as Amy Edmondson has observed in her work with teams. Studying cardiac surgery teams, she noted the role of the leader in creating conditions for team learning. Modest surgeons, who were prepared to admit the possibility of making mistakes, produced far better results than world experts.13 Before concluding, we must address a criticism that can be made of this approach. What if the consistency in small actions leads to an outcome which does not constitute a moral good? We see examples from the pages of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies to the scandals in Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust and elsewhere. Ecological insights suggest two of the key features we have looked at need to be present.

First, the importance of disturbance: where criticism is discouraged and dissent crushed, it is unlikely that the system will be healthy. Secondly, information feedback across boundaries is needed. Golding’s young boys acted out their brutality on the closed ecosystem of an island.

Too often, it takes brave whistle blowers (boundary spanning prophets) to expose such scandals.

Sabbath rest As this article emerged, I realised it might end up with six main sections. This prompted a final lesson from nature. The need for rest. Ken Costa comes from the relentless world of investment banking, but he includes a perceptive quote from an anonymous author: ‘One of the more distracting things about capitalist culture ... is that there is ... no time to vegetate. What I would suggest is more time wasting, less stimulation. We need time to lie fallow like we did in childhood, so we can recuperate ...

I think we would benefit greatly from spells of vaguely restless boredom.’14

Summary We started by contemplating compost, before moving on via a challenge to the traditional interpretation of the first creation story to surprising leadership lessons from jazz.

We have looked at a number of interconnected lessons from the natural world, weaving in biblical and theological material as we go. Some lessons may be counterintuitive and/or induce anxiety, or they may be reassuring: we are not in control, disturbance is good, leadership often happens at the edge, consistency in small things matters.

Whatever our reaction, I hope we also recognise the need for rest … which may lead to a spell of gardening.

Always Change a Winning Team (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Business, 2005).

9. G Kohlrieser, S Goldsworthy & D Coombe, Care to Dare: Unleashing Astonishing Potential through Secure Base Leadership (San Francisco, CA: JosseyBass, 2012).

10. T Wight OSB in K Dollard, A MarettCrosby & T Wright, Doing Business with Benedict (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 201.

11. E.g. the period in the wilderness after his baptism (Mk. 1.12–13//) and the Garden of Gethsemane (Mk. 14.32–42//).

For the latter, see WH Vanstone, The Stature of Waiting (London: DLT, 1982).

I am grateful to Michael Moynagh for introducing me to Vanstone’s work, which resonates with many of the concepts we are considering, especially questions of control.

12. M Alvesson & S Sveningsson (2003) ‘Managers Doing Leadership: The Extraordinarization of the Mundane’, Human Relations, 56.12 (2003), pp. 1435–59.

13. A Edmondson, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy (San Francisco, CA: JosseyBass, 2012).

14. K Costa, God at Work (London: Continuum, 2007), p. 114. See also T Horsfall, Working from a Place of Rest (Abingdon: BRF, 2010).

19

Transmission

Leadership and virtue in sport Introduction

Paul Bickley Paul Bickley is the Director of Political Programme at Theos. He is author of Coming off the Bench and Building Jerusalem?

Christianity and the Labour Party.

Of all the trust-destroying institutional crises we have seen in recent years, those that have affected the institutions of sport have been among the most disenchanting. Not many people love investment bankers, we expect very little from tabloid journalists and European Union officials do not occupy a place close to most people’s hearts. When, by sins of commission or omission, individuals or institutions in these fields drastically fail to meet public expectations, or even break the law, then we may be angry, but we’re rarely disappointed.

But there’s no disappointment more crushing than learning that an accomplished and revered athlete has compromised him- or herself. As much as we’d like our elite sportsmen and women to meet the person specification for the job of ‘role model’, hardly a day passes without a new on-pitch controversy or personal indiscretion hitting the back pages, giving the lie to the ancient but enduring belief that there is a correlation between physical prowess and moral achievement.1 As the journalist Simon Barnes puts it, sportsmen are the naughty vicars of the twenty-first century – respected representatives caught dipping into the collection box, supping the communion wine, and so on. The same goes for the institutions that we think ought to carry treasured sporting traditions, yet are beset by corruption and crises of leadership. When it comes to sport, we love more dearly, we expect more, and then when there are failings we suffer a personal sense of dismay.

We also carry an intuition that sport is a field in which we are trained in noble virtues. This idea has a long history, with roots in the ancient Greek concept of

20

kalokagathia (the unity of nobility in appearance and in conduct) but you could identify a similar notion undergirding chivalric virtues in the middle ages, or the nineteenth century Turnen gymnasium movement in Germany. It also resonates with the idea of ‘muscular Christianity’, advanced by the Victorian clergyman and author Charles Kingsley in Britain. He disliked the phrase (and indeed it sounds particularly unusual to modern ears; muscular here doesn’t mean ‘aggressive’ but ‘physical’), but for Kingsley, sport could give young men (and it usually was young men) ‘not merely daring and endurance, but, better still, temper, self-restraint, fairness, honour, unenvious approbation of another’s success, and all that ‘give and take’ of life which stand a man in good stead when he goes forth into the world, and without which, indeed, his success is always maimed and partial.’2 In Britain, these ideas spread through educators like Thomas Arnold, then through clergymen (who often helped establish some of the football clubs with which we are familiar to this day), and then through institutions like the YMCA and the Scouts. Through Pierre de Coubertin, it entered into mythology of the modern Olympics, and so continues to have a sustained impact on the Western view of the relationship between sport, physical fitness and goodness.

The clutch of recent stories around player or administrator corruption and misbehaviour give the impression that there is something going drastically and systematically wrong in the world of sport – temper, selfrestraint, fairness? When did you last see these virtues in a sportsman or sportswoman? Of course, they’re far from

Summer 2015 absent, but particularly in elite sport, it seems they’re harder to exercise than ever.

global entertainment industry, and as such one of the ‘commodities’ which is being exported across the planet.

Whatever has changed the game on the pitch has also changed the game off the pitch – in the boardrooms, the manager’s office, the stands and the governing institutions. The FIFA corruption scandal is only the most recent of a long string of examples. It was not so long ago that the International Olympic Committee itself was struggling to get to grips with its own kleptocratic culture, or when elite cycling was blighted with allegations of endemic doping. FIFA’s bribe culture has been a semi-open secret since 2006; the recent arrests and indictments are simply the early fruits of the first proper criminal investigation.

The point is that elite sport is now often a tool – leverage to achieve some other goal. ‘“We have the longterm rights in most countries to major sporting events,” Rupert Murdoch told News Corp shareholders in 1996.

In short, if sport was ever some kind of morality machine, then something seems to have broken.

What is sport?

To begin to understand some of these issues, we must reflect on what sport is and what it isn’t.

Whenever ‘sport’ is written about or discussed, problems of definition arise. Do sports have to be competitive? Do they have to be physical? We might think that there are obvious answers to these questions, but every obvious answer is undermined by exceptions and caveats.

Climbing is extraordinary physically demanding, but it is not competitive. Chess is extremely competitive, but almost non-physical.

We need not resolve this perennial pub conundrum here. The point, rather, is that what usually comes to mind when we think of sport is a particular stage in the development of some aspects of this part of human culture. Historically speaking, it is very recent. The first football league was established in England in 1888, the first Test Match was played in Melbourne in 1877 and basketball wasn’t even invented until 1891.

Of course, people have played different games for thousands of years, but sport as we know it now is synthesis of those games and the economic, social and technological developments of the era of global communication. There is a profound similarity between what is happening on the pitch in a World Cup final and what’s happening in the local park on a Sunday morning, but they’re not the same, and not just because the players on the pitch in the World Cup final are better. In all sorts of ways, the meaning of and our engagement with the two are radically different. The sport which is played so that people can watch it is different from the sport that we actually play; as different as cooking is from watching a cookery programme, as learning to play the piano is from plugging in your headphones and pressing play.

Sport is now far less a thing that we do, and far more something that we watch other people do on screens of various kinds. If sport as we know it is an invention, roughly speaking, of the last 200 years, it has experienced a metamorphosis over the last 50 years, which has placed it at the very heart of the

if sport was ever some kind of morality machine, then something seems to have broken “We intend to ... use sports as a battering ram ... in all our pay-TV operations.”’3 Murdoch wasn’t paying for the privilege of broadcasting sports, he was buying the bait which would attract more and more customers.

This is not without benefits. The money that has flowed into the top layer of English football has, for example, seen improvements in major stadium facilities. Yet it has changed how key decision makers think about sport, and those birds are coming home to roost. Much of what goes wrong happens under cover of the language of ‘markets’ and ‘business’. Jack Warner, one of the members of FIFA’s executive committee who is now squarely in the frame, is reported to have said of colleagues who would not accept bribes, ‘There are some people here who think they are “more pious than thou” If you’re pious, open a church, friends. Our business is our business.’

No longer for its own sake These developments have created a crisis in sport not, as if we were developing a watered-down Marxist critique, because there’s ‘too much money’ in sport. Very clearly, that is not always the case – many elite athletes live financially precarious lives, and many sport clubs, including some of those playing are the highest levels, are far from profit-making. No – the trope that ‘sport is big business’ is one example of a flaw in our conception of sport which creates the conditions where all kinds of cheating, misbehaviour and corruption flourish. To understand the issue in full, we need to think again about the essence of sport – not as it is but as it should be.

On an explanatory level, the idea of play as the essence of sport is compelling. In his seminal book on the subject, Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga argued that, first and foremost, play requires a stepping out of ordinary life into specific spaces and specific times where different rules apply, that it is ordered – it requires rules, which if persistently broken mean that play will no longer be taking place and that it tends to the creation of ‘play communities’ – clubs of players, spectators and so on.4 Most importantly, however, play is ‘never imposed by physical necessity or moral duty. It is never a task. It is done at leisure, during “free time”’.5 It offers, therefore, a kind of transcendence: ‘In play there is something “at play” which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action.’6 Since it is not done ‘for’ anything, play is a concrete expression of freedom.

NOTES 1. The Greek concept of arête – excellence – dominated thinking about sporting ability and ethics, but this is not simply a trope of ancient Greece. In the Gospel of John, when Jesus and his disciples encounter a blind man, the disciples ask ‘who has sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind’ (Jn 9.1). Jesus’ answer was neither.

2. Quoted in B Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 119.

3. Quoted in T de Lisle, ‘How did sport get so big?’ Intelligent Life, Summer 2010, available online at http:// moreintelligentlife. co.uk/print/content/ ideas/tim-de-lisle/ how-did-sport-getso-big 4. J Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).

5. Ibid., p. 8.

6. Ibid., p. 1.

7. Play in our society of compulsion and work oftentimes does little more than provide a quality of suspension, temporarily unburden us, or assist political stabilisation, work

21

Transmission Play is not only expressed through sport, but the idea has been the basis for both the appreciation and compelling critique of sport in its modern guise. For Hugo Rahner, God is the ‘ultimate player’. For Jürgen Moltmann, in creation and incarnation God was playful while we – homo faber, man the worker – experience a degree of alienation in our attempts to play.7 Similarly, Robert K Johnston agrees that modern commercialised sport has lost its playfulness, and thus its sacred roots.

And play lies at the centre of Michael Novak’s thesis in The Joy of Sports, where sport has been ‘raised to such a pitch of technical organisation and scientific thoroughness that the real play-spirit is threatened with

elite sport suffers from a fateful over-seriousness and a necessity, which leeches the playfulness from the games we play

morality, and social regimentation. Quoted in RK Johnston, The Christian at Play (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997). http://www. religion-online.org/ showchapter.asp?title= 3366&C=2760 8. This paragraph relies on NJ Watson and A Parker’s (eds) introductory essay ‘Mapping the Field’ in Sports and Christianity: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 16.

9. L Harvey, A Brief Theology of Sport (London: SCM, 2014).

extinction’.8 Most recently, for Lincoln Harvey, sport represents ‘a liturgical celebration of our creaturely contingency’.9 Play is ‘autotelic’ (for itself alone) because when we play we are being ourselves as much as we can be: to be human is to be unnecessary, called into being by nothing but our creator’s love.

Sport can be easily corrupted by being made necessary.

In our environment, the intrusion of the market is the primary cause of ludic diffusion, but there are many others. Sport has become ‘important’ for sustaining local or national reputation, for peacemaking, for community development, necessary for fitness and public health, necessary even for the economy, and even for evangelism. Whether sport is an effective means of reaching these objectives is debatable (witness, for instance, the lack of an ‘Olympic bounce’ in sporting participation rates). The point, however, is that necessity is corrosive to play, such that much of what passes now for sport has little play within it – no longer one of Berger’s five ‘signals of transcendence’, now another piece of cursed dirt.

When interviewing elite sportspeople for research for Christians in Sport and Bible Society, it became clear to me that this is not just a theoretical or philosophical complaint. The life of many elite athletes is one of anxiety, though they recognise that other would be envious of their position. As one former Premier League footballer put it to me, ‘Your focus changes because you recognise it’s not just playing football, but you realise you can play football and make money.’ It is the difference between living ‘for’ or ‘off’ the sport you once loved. High levels of competition, high levels of scrutiny, the risk of injury (and thus the loss of earnings) and the difficulty of forming strong relationships (the question ‘what does this person want from me’ is often at the forefront of players’ mind), even knowing how to use large amounts of spare time, are among the pastoral challenges peculiar to elite sport. That anxiety is precisely a product of the seriousness of sport.

22

What is to be done?

Sport – at least elite sport – suffers from a fateful overseriousness and a necessity, which leeches the playfulness from the games we play. This over-seriousness is often somewhere in the picture when sport goes bad, whether we talking about institutional corruption or individuals players, or even rampant fan misbehaviour.

There is no simple solution – no easy way, for instance, to untangle the elite sport from the global entertainment industry with which it has now effectively hybridised. Governance bodies like FIFA will have to be embarrassed, harassed and prosecuted until they are prepared to put their houses in order.

If we have correctly diagnosed the malaise of contemporary sport, we need to be careful that we identify the right prescription – and it can’t simply be moralism, the demand that players or governance institutions should just do better. Given the theological emphasis on the play ethic in most contemporary theological engagement, a resort to moralism is theologically incoherent, as well as being unattractive. The outcome of the gospel, interacting authentically with a particular aspect of human culture should be a more expansive life, rest and the lifting of burdens (Mt 11.30; Jn 10.10). If the Christian witness in the world of sport is to advocate for and enforce behavioural norms, or better regulation, perhaps through codes of practice (probably a futile endeavour, in any case), then it is very much distorted. If such codes have a role, it is not to encourage the expression of virtue but to suppress possible vice.

What we need to see is a huge transfer of emphasis, resources and attention away from the elite level, and toward ensuring that ordinary people have the appropriate opportunities and facilities to enjoy sport.

What part might the church play? Here are two ideas.

First, as Christian individuals, we need to transfer our love of sport from endlessly spectatorship of elite sport into participation. For sport to be playful, it needs to be played – ironic, then, that just at the moment when many feel they can’t escape from sport that participation rates are falling. What could churches do to see people playing more sport? Could they open their green spaces to the public, installing sport equipment? Could they make better use of other facilities, such as church halls?

Could they be encouraged to establish mid-week sport groups, seeing this as legitimate part of discipleship?

Second, as churches, we can in our own small ways instrumentalise sport, making it a means to an end. Major tournaments are often accompanied by para-church campaigns, using them as a pretext for evangelism.

Worse than this, individual Christian athletes are used as pet celebrities, with no regard for the discipleship or pastoral implications. Agencies like Sport Chaplains UK demonstrate that the ministry within sport can and should be more focused on athletes as human beings, not as sporting celebrities. Sport chaplains have a potentially transformative impact on clubs not because they see sporting performance or ‘success’ as entirely irrelevant – they have broken the cycle of over-seriousness.

Summer 2015

News from Bible Society James Catford Group Chief Executive

Kingdoms in conflict ‘Everyone’, said Dallas Willard ‘has a kingdom, or queendom, that they are running.’ In his definition a kingdom is the ‘the range of our effective will’ or the place where ‘what we want done, is done’.

From the change in our pockets or purses to our plans for our retirement, and from the staff who answer to us through to the education for our children, these are things over which we have control. They are our kingdoms, at least until such time when we find that we don’t have the control that we once thought we had.

In this sense we are all leaders of something.

But the problem for humanity is that our little kingdoms keep bumping into each other. The silos we build and the clashes we experience demonstrate that the worlds that we run can very often run over the person standing next to us. Right across the fields of media, arts, politics and even education we see many examples of kingdoms in conflict.

God, of course, has his own kingdom. The place where what he wants done, is done.

The invitation for the follower of Christ is to fold our little realms into his. It’s not only the right way to honour and worship him, it’s that safest place to be in the universe; living within the effective range of his will.

Looking back over the last dozen or so issues of Transmission the clash of kingdoms is all too evident. From food security to sovereignty to our surveillance society, this is the stuff of worlds at war. The rise of ISIS and radical Islam are further proof that we have been unable to harmonise the world, even by force.

While noticeable settlements and accords have been reached over the centuries, often what starts as playground-size squabbles end up as overwhelming warfare. The centenary of the First World War is but one stark reminder of this.

Transmission is provided free by Bible Society as part of our mission to equip the church to live out the Bible’s message. We also work creatively and with passion to show that the Bible resonates with issues today – and to make Scriptures available where there are none.

As you read the pages of Transmission, sometimes over several years, would you consider supporting the quality thinking and theological reflection you are receiving?

The editorial group behind this journal remain committed to delivering it free to its readers so that no one is excluded from it. But it is still a costly item in our budget and your kind donations to help us keep going will be a huge encouragement to us.

Please think and pray about whether you can give a regular amount to Bible Society to make it possible for others to receive it too. Simply contact us through our website and select the ‘donate’ button. Both a Direct Debit or a one-off donation will be greatly appreciated and very well used in bringing the spotlight of Scripture to the issues of today.

As we greet James, we say farewell to Philip Green who stands down as Chair after three years in the role. Our thanks go with him for his support and leadership of the Board and for the leadership team of Bible Society.

James Catford is Group Chief Executive of Bible Society. Email him at James.Catford@biblesociety.org.uk

Archbishop Justin Welby in China In June this year Bible Society assisted the Archbishop of Canterbury during his first visit to mainland China since taking up his role in 2012. Through our China Partnership team and our membership of United Bible Societies, I had the pleasure of travelling with Justin Welby and the Bishop of Birmingham, David Urquhart.

One of the highlights of the tour was a visit to the Amity Printing Company where I serve as vice-chair. We saw for ourselves the extraordinary work of the largest producer of the Bible in the world. Over 135 million copies have now been printed, mainly for use within China itself.

Welcome to our new Chair Bible Society welcomes James Featherby as the new Chair of Trustees at Bible Society.

After as successful law career, James brings a wealth of experience to us. We hope that Transmission readers will soon ‘meet’ him through the pages of either this magazine or our sister publication Word in Action.

23

Bible Society is an advocate for the Bible in contemporary cultures, resourcing and influencing those who shape society – making the voice of the Bible heard.

The Bible in Transmission is published by Bible Society, Stonehill Green,Westlea, Swindon SN5 7DG T: 01793 418100 F: 01793 418118 biblesociety.org.uk Charity Registration No. 232759 Incorporated by Royal Charter Chair of the Board of Trustees James Featherby Group Chief Executive James Catford Editorial Team Matthew van Duyvenbode, Steve Holmes, Brian Howell, Nick Spencer Editor Tony Graham ISBN 978-0-564-09116-4 ŠBible Society 2015