Herding cats: The case for attempting to manage the Church of England

Stephen Pattison is one of the few theologians who has reflected constructively on the ideologies of managerialism and their relation to the life of the church. This chapter takes up Pattison's observation that the problems of scarcity necessitate some form of structural management and shows that contemporary criticisms of management in the Church of England not only neglect this point but conceal other agendas, whilst retaining a central nub of truth. Echoing Pattison's ‘worm's eye view’ of management in institutions, management in today's Church of England (CofE) looks rather different from the perspective of the National Church Institutions to the view promulgated by activists representing divergent and incompatible ambitions for the church. Drawing on John Atherton's typology of the Age of Atonement followed by the Age of Incarnation, it plots the evolving political and theological forces within the church, as the different elements in the ecclesial coalition (present since the Elizabethan Settlement) wax and wane in influence, driven by changing dynamics in the wider political discourse about national identity and the stringent constraints imposed by declining material and human resources. It concludes that crude attacks on managerialism are often wide of the mark and that the over-riding task of management in the Church of England is to ensure the continuation of its vocation to be a coalition of complementary theological perspectives – an objective which is itself justified theologically and which might become a transferable model of virtuous management.