The hand that feeds you

I wonder: may be there is a need for ministerial training to include something about systems analysis! After all, if Walter Wink is right, then every 'system' - every power-that-be - is, to use traditional Christian language, 'fallen' and yet capable of being 'redeemed', and this presumably applies to the church as well. We need to see the church, then, as a system in its own right, since if we are called in some sense to 'manage change', then we must understand - we must be able to analyse - the systems at work in the life of the church, the ways in which people behave because they are in thralled by a 'system'. For people cannot individually be blamed for their intransigence, perhaps, or for ignorance, or for manipulativeness, but should be understood as operating within a collective "groupthink" - or in Orwell's terms, by the "doublethink" which allows people to believe contradictory things at the same time unquestioningly. To ask these things, to suggest these criticisms, of course feels a little like biting the hand that feeds you - if 'you' are a minister, as I am - because it seems like disloyalty, hum-bug, to suggest that your employing institution is 'fallen'! Or it implies that I'm simply frustrated that things aren't going my way at the moment - it comes out of a sense of my inability to deal with what's up! And yet, seriously, it is also good news: for I must see myself as much a part of this fallen movement as anyone else; that we are all complicit with the operation of the system; that something is going on which transcends the behaviour of any individual, so no one of us should beat ourselves up about it. But the question is: is it for individuals to 'see the light', to change from within, or should we engage as a corporate body in the analysis of our incapacity? I suggest we need to look at this together, that it should therefore be part of how ministers and church leaders are trained into the role, that direct engagement with the system already starts to transform it.