What Ever Happened to the Cure of Souls?

Is ‘leadersmithing’ what the Church really needs these days? An article in last week’s Church Times (Comment, Church Times 3^rd March, 2017) has left me wondering about this. 

Leadership, as the article suggests, is becoming more than ever a skill, ideally to be learned in one of those hothouses for training talent-spotted future bishops and archbishops. 'The word 'leadersmith' implies something like 'coping'. It also has a rough hewn edge to it. It resonates with the earth and the workaday business of the factory shop floor. But the sad reality, when it comes to leadership in the Church, is that it is more often about stress of management. Perhaps the emphasis on the kind of skill needed to achieve and then survive in high office in the Church also involves learning how to engage with the kind of rivalry that goes on beneath the surface when career clericalism is revealed for what it really is.

  

While ambition and personal advancement are to be expected, though not necessarily desirable, in the context of secular organisations, is ‘leadersmithing’, really how the Church of God should be shaping its future leaders? I seem to remember Christ warning his disciples against such an approach, offering them instead a young child as a model of true leadership. Perhaps he was thinking of Isaiah 11:6. Admittedly, the child must have been very young, given that most children, once they are old enough to go to playgroup, very quickly learn how to fend for themselves in regard to power and territorial ownership. Chanel 4’s The Secret Life of Four Year Olds ought to be mandatory viewing for those picked for high office in the Church.

Power and being childlike are, of course, incompatible. Furthermore, power is seldom accompanied by authority. With a few notable exceptions (Barack Obama and Pope Francis being two of them), powerful people are often more childish than childlike, especially when their grip on power is threatened. More than one world leader springs to mind in this latter regard. These people have little genuine authority. They are an example of how childishness, if not outgrown in childhood, becomes dominant self interest in later life. Dominant self interest, and the envious rivalry to which it too often gives rise, does not elicit respect or bestow the kind of authority needed for true leadership.

True leadership brings with it the authority which comes with transparent love for the people a leader is called to serve. This is what Jesus meant by being childlike. A leader who has this quality will be instantly recognisable and trusted because the nature of their love is essentially sacrificial. For clergy, whatever their rank, sacrificial love is what is entailed in what used to be called ‘the cure of souls’. It remains the essence of our calling today.

Having the cure of souls involves commitment to God. In other words, it involves all the time that it takes for a person to be able to see themselves and others as God sees them. In terms of how they perceive themselves, this will inevitably lead to a ‘refining’ sacrifice. The cure of souls involves the refining of one’s own soul first. For one thing, it will demand that the ordained person be prepared to let go of all that they hold to be important in terms of their career in the Church.

Career clericalism is arguably one of the aspects of Church life which most undermines the work of mission and evangelism. There are few things more incompatible with the good news of Christ’s gospel than a distant and overly busy bishop who has little time for his or her clergy – or the priest who, when the peace is being shared, is too busy looking to see how many people are in church that Sunday to make eye contact with the person in front of them who is in need of a small moment of their undivided loving attention. Those who turn to the clergy for wisdom or understanding may want to speak of their hidden fears in regard to the state of the world, or to someone they love. They expect to see, or sense, the loving kindness of God working through the priest or bishop. They expect to see the face of Christ in that person. Sometimes they do.