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Is church bureaucracy demonic?

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Is church bureaucracy demonic?

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has made a rather startling remark about Church bureaucracy. He was in a conversation at Unherd about evil and the demonic in culture—especially “the erosion of standards of truthfulness in public life and the normalisation of violence in word and deed”. And he was also worried about a church “too preoccupied with strategy — with schemes for solving problems — and not preoccupied enough with its own integrity as a community of witness and prayer.” Was this, too, demonic? “In a word, yes”, explaining that the diabolical is a “pull to the destructive and towards a kind of idolatry of the self and the corporate self and its well-being and security and control.”

I know very well that Williams intensely dislikes bureaucracy and ‘managerialism’; I learnt it from him in personal conversation, but also from observation when I joined the Archbishops’ Council just over ten years ago. The Council then appeared to have inherited a fairly chaotic set-up, and despite significant improvements, I still have major questions about its effectiveness. 

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The Wisdom of the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals: A Response to Paul Avis

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The Wisdom of the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals: A Response to Paul Avis

Andrew Goddard writes: There are multiple visions for the future of the Anglican Communion. One, being offered by Gafcon, is found in the Abuja Affirmation. Another is found in the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals (NCPs) developed by the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith, and Order (IASCUFO), which will be considered by the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) in Belfast this summer.

Both of these visions are attempts at addressing our fractured common life and witness. The NCPs have recently been strongly rejected by Paul Avis, a Church of England scholar and ecumenist, in a Church Times essay. Avis sees the NCPs as “deeply troubling” and having “seismic consequences for the Anglican Communion,” indeed meaning “the Communion would not be a ‘communion’ at all, as ecclesial communion has been universally understood: namely, as a eucharistic communion with an interchangeable ordained ministry.” Given Avis’ standing and signs that others in the Church of England, including leading bishops, are also concerned about the NCPs, it is important to understand and evaluate his arguments.

He opens with an account of IASCUFO’s mandate and here he fails to acknowledge a key element of the mandate that sheds light on his fundamental disagreements. The ACC resolution which he quotes not only referred to the need to “address our differences in the Anglican Communion” (3(a)). It also affirmed “the importance of seeking to walk together to the highest degree possible, and learning from our ecumenical conversations how to accommodate differentiation patiently and respectfully.”

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