“The system is breaking. Let it break. Your first job is to ensure it doesn’t break you. Then stick around to help us build the new one.”

It seems a bit pompous to begin an article quoting myself, but I do so to illustrate that this has been going on for some time.

Back when the Diocese of Melbourne invested in a solid program for equipping new Priests-in-Charge of parishes (EPIC) they used to invite me back for some frank talk with my colleagues. I always said something along these lines.

Let it break. Your first job is to ensure it doesn’t break you.

The overall structure of our church is not fit for purpose. In many ways, we still have a nineteenth-century structure attempting to satisfy twenty-first century compliance demands. The inevitable result of this is a failure to comply, massive inefficiencies in resource allocation, and the burnout of many of those trying to hold things together in the interim with string and spreadsheets.

Let it break. Your first job is to ensure it doesn’t break you.

We should notice that we’re not alone here. This issue is not peculiar to the church. It’s a widespread problem in professional vocations – education, health, and social workers are all drowning in it, vocationally disoriented, burning out, and leaving in droves.

The whole approach of society to risk is to imagine that everything could have been prevented if only another piece of paper had been filled out. So, each time something goes wrong somewhere sometime; the paperwork and mental load is increased for everyone everywhere all the time.

This is unsustainable. Something bigger must come eventually, in the break of this whole system and the approach of our society to risk management. The pendulum is swinging to maximal red tape.

Let it break. Your first job is to ensure it doesn’t break you.

And yet, the problem in the church is worse. Because even if that pendulum swings back to a reasonable centre, our structures are still not fit for purpose.

Let us speak frankly, for the time is short. These are our problems:

1. We do not have an alignment of responsibility, visibility, and capacity to act.
2. We cannot create that alignment with a heavily decentralised system, which is what we have.
3. Parishes do not trust the centre enough to allow it to centralise.
4. The centre does not have the visibility of the parishes to centralise competently.
5. Therefore the work of bearing responsibility is shafted onto vicars; the work of being the conduit of visibility is shafted onto vicars; and all expectations of action are shafted onto vicars.
6. Vicars have not been selected or trained for anything like that skill set.

These are problems which have proved intractable for a long time. This is not something solved by pat answers, like “just preach the gospel”. We need strategic managerial reform, because bad management hinders gospel preaching. We need, in a word, centralisation.

But can we trust our centre to competently centralise? From a long history of past performance and false starts, not really.

To break this impasse, we need to solve the fourth problem, and then use that to solve the third. We need to engineer systems that build visibility of parish life to the centre. Then – and only then - parishes should hand the centre trust to take over safety, compliance and property management tasks based upon that visibility. If the centre can truly see them, we might believe they can actually do them, and let go.

The order is important. Centralising before visibility will fail to solve the problem and damage trust further, because the centre will be working blind, and we will both fall into a pit.

If we can achieve those two things, building a virtuous circle of central competence and parish trust, a world of good can break out. Management tasks will disappear from vicar’s heads, they will be vocationally realigned, spend more time on the things they are trained for and passionate about, and more missionally effective.

The people responsible for things will be able to see if they are actually doing them right down to the parish level, through a series of reports.

And so responsibility, visibility, and capacity to act will belong to the same people, those people will be selected and trained for those tasks, and they won’t be the vicars.

That’s the dream. But the reality will be bumpier than that. Real people doing real jobs make real mistakes. Parishes are notoriously suspicious of giving up power. And this is definitely that.

But it’s the only way out. We must support and encourage the centralisation of safety, compliance and property management tasks – even if our own parish can currently do it better than the centre.

We must encourage and honour those doing the slog work of compliance for us, not allowing them to be invisible.

We must use our power to strengthen others, rather than to think of our power as something to be grasped.

Huh. Sounds like someone else I know. Perhaps the solution lies in preaching the gospel after all.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus… Philippians 2:5

 Rev'd Canon Matt Williams is the Vicar at St James' Old Cathedral, Melbourne West