Lord Mawson
Main Page: Lord Mawson (Crossbench - Life peer)
Lord Mawson (CB)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, for introducing this timely and necessary debate. As a non-conformist minister I would like the debate to widen and take on board the non-conformist churches which are responsible for a large proportion of the 55,000 church buildings in this country.
Many of the traditional church structures in this country are facing some serious challenges and are reviewing the uses of their buildings, assets and people. This is happening at the same time as the present Government are rightly encouraging a localism agenda, which potentially brings many opportunities to the churches, but I worry that the dots, in practice, are not being joined up.
I have been a minister in the United Reform Church for over 30 years and have experienced the best and worst of what the Christian denominations have to offer in this country. At their best, they have offered kindness, opportunity and a strong sense of community that has helped relieve social tensions and supported the most vulnerable in our society. At their worst, they have been closed-off, sadly sometimes inward-looking, with their heads in the sand if not in the clouds.
Where there are successful churches, I have seen a strong correlation between their actions and those of a well run small business or enterprise. Fundamentally, the churches are organisations with accounts, property, services and employees on the scale of a medium to large corporation. They have a business model of sorts that is based around the attendance and donations of the congregation. However, since many of the churches’ traditional social services were appropriated by the formation of the welfare state, many, but certainly not all, have lost sight of the practicalities of daily life, and the amount of red tape they now have to dance around has created a risk-averse culture. Better to do nothing than to take the risk of doing something and getting it wrong.
Arguably, this lack of clear focus and positive activity by the churches, rather than just a straightforward rise in secular beliefs, led to a drop in congregation numbers, breaking their fragile model and leading to a spiral of decline. That this decline has not been more pronounced is due to the assets the churches have, the disposal of which has allowed them to continue as if their present structures and often relative inaction were justifiable. It is not. It is not sustainable and, more importantly, it is causing many churches to fail to fulfil the vast majority of their social potential.
Some of our churches have still not responded to 1945. The problem is that generally they have turned their backs on business and enterprise and do not understand it. Often there is an ideological element to this, an anti-business mentality guided by well-meaning but naive ideas that capitalism is in some way immoral, that profit is theft, and that globalisation is really a gloss for exploitation. These were the views that predominated among the faith and social sectors when I first came to work as a minister in the East End of London in the early 1980s, and in my experience were in practice the drivers of poverty and a dependency culture in the area. We need only look at the protests at St Paul’s Cathedral in recent years to see that these attitudes still exist. Where there has not been outright hostility to business and enterprise, there has often been apathy and the growth of its symbiotic partner, a grants-based dependency culture.
The financial position and attitude of many, but not all, non-conformist churches in particular is not healthy, but these issues are endemic throughout Christian faith organisations. I know this from my first-hand experience of conducting consultancy work for churches across the nation. Here I must declare an interest as a director of the agency One Church, 100 Uses, a church-based social enterprise I created with colleagues to undertake this work and support churches in this endeavour. The key to transforming the situation is to embrace sound business principles. Our company recently undertook a piece of work with the Church in Wales, and I believe that our recommendations carry considerable resonance with the rest of the denominations across the United Kingdom.
If churches are going to survive and play a useful role in society and our buildings are to continue to inspire, Christian communities need to embrace the opportunities that, in time, the localism agenda may bring. They are certainly going to have to become more flexible to the needs of their communities as the next generation of young people grows up in an enterprise culture. Although mostly old and many in need of some attention, church buildings are actually assets, but because they are underused they often become liabilities, sapping the energy of the ministers and congregations who look after them. They need to be used more often and to become income generators. To achieve this requires some entrepreneurial ability. If that is not present in the immediate congregation, people need to look outside their usual comfort zone and build partnerships with sympathetic local small business people and entrepreneurs.
On our recent trip to Wales, we visited a church with an attached café. It was heavily subsidised by grants, a situation that is simply not going to be possible in the coming years. Over the road was a curry house, the winner of the Cardiff “Best Indian Restaurant” award 2011. Did that restaurateur know anything about the culture of churches? Probably not, but did he know something about how to make a small food-based business work in the local area? Actually, yes, he did. However, the church people had no idea of his existence. He was outside the realm of their understanding even though he was a member of the local community, because they had not thought to cross the road to speak to him and learn from him. When this is done, I can say from experience that interesting things happen. This is not just an isolated incident or a Welsh problem. It is a whole enclosed way of thinking that pervades the public sector as much as the churches.
Where there is some entrepreneurial flair within the church, it needs to be supported by a permissive attitude that sees the buildings as assets to be used and within which innovation and enterprise are encouraged alongside reflection, prayer and contemplation. Our beautiful ancient monasteries knew a great deal about this approach and embodied a culture of work and prayer that we need to engage with again. We are certainly actively doing this in the church I have been responsible for in Bromley-by-Bow, where with colleagues we have created over 50 businesses. That enterprise culture has helped to provide many hundreds of jobs and thousands of homes. There is nothing new here for Christianity.
The clergy are not generally regarded as the most entrepreneurial of people, and usually with good reason: you do not become a member of the cloth to open a haberdasher’s. However, for the clergy to be fully trained but ignorant of the very basics of business is irresponsible, if not inexcusable. A minister I spoke to recently said that by the time he had finished his theological training, he could not read a set of accounts, even though his church’s funds would ultimately be his responsibility. I find this baffling to say the least, but unfortunately not surprising. I would suggest that churches need to revisit their clergy recruitment and training and address this gaping hole in their education to give people the tools to put their natural creativity into practice.
Beyond the lack of entrepreneurs and a reluctance to move from a position of complacent decline, there are greater problems of leadership and management. As has already been mentioned, throughout the denominations there is an ever increasing number of church buildings that a single minister is becoming responsible for. It is a situation that is not going to attract good candidates to ministry or keep the current group fresh and motivated. Instead of being the salt and the yeast in the community and addressing social issues, ministers find themselves engaging in an endless round of services and meetings about property. If the churches are to embrace some of the opportunities presenting themselves in the localism agenda and the enterprise culture within which we all now live, hard questions need to asked about closing some churches, at least temporarily, to allow ministers to get involved in the communities in which they are meant to be leaders and to focus on making the other churches in their care self-sustaining. For churches to develop working and enterprising partnerships with their communities, it takes time and the ability to take the long-term view, but those are precisely the resources that the churches should be bringing to bear. There are some great examples of people doing all of this right across the country, but they are far too few and the lessons are often not being learnt by our church structures.
I am making all these suggestions to help revive the churches and encourage a practical and creative culture, one that is less about dependency and more about making the most of opportunities and assets. In spite of the churches’ committee-heavy structures and wide turning circles, there is time to rectify their problems; the situation is not irretrievable. It requires a shift in mindset that challenges a culture heavy with bureaucracy to become one that encourages entrepreneurs and celebrates ingenuity. There is a theological element that the churches are failing to grasp here. We believe that we are made in the image of God the creator and therefore we are creative beings. The fact is that business principles are those that work best at putting these ideas into practice, having been tried and tested by the competition of the marketplace. They are not “evil”, but are a set of tools that can be used for moral or, of course, immoral ends. I urge the churches to embrace this enterprising culture, to use their talents and join the next generation of young people as they become ever more entrepreneurial, while they still have the time.