Issues of review and development and individual ministerial practice.

A response to the proposal in the Church of England for annual appraisal or ministerial development planning for clergy.

 This paper will argue that plans to substantially increase resources devoted to developmental review of clergy practice are questionable.  My objection is that the proposed framework of annual development review is likely to be so under-resourced that it will raise unjustifiable expectations and unachievable obligations, or that it will at the least spend more money for no appreciable gain.  I offer this critique with some hesitation, not least because I was part of the national group that initiated a scheme for Personal Development Planning (PDP) for clergy in 1998-9, but my defence is that my worries have changed considerably since then.

PDP and review procedures and the appraisal processes from which they have evolved disclose in a stark manner the changing social location of the ordained person in contemporary society.  Where once the clergy role was largely unquestioned and unchallenged, it must now be categorised and objectively labelled in terms of functions, performance, and competencies.  In this ordained parochial ministry as profession is experiencing pressures similar to those felt in other so-called “traditional professions” like teaching, medicine and law.  Review and appraisal under its many different guises across the dioceses of the Church of England is but one aspect of a new focus on definition and objectivization within the religious establishment that mirrors changes in other long-standing institutions.

Without necessarily concurring with the secularization theorists’ perspective on religion in contemporary society, the rational formalities of appraisal do appear to echo aspects of their diagnosis.  For example, Wilson citing the factors that he believes exemplify secularization includes in his list,

… the supplanting, in matters of behaviour, of religious precepts by demands that accord with strictly technical criteria; and the gradual replacement of a specifically religious consciousness [ … ] by an empirical, rational, instrumental orientation; the abandonment of mythical, poetic, and artistic interpretations of nature and society in favour of matter-of-fact description and, with it, the rigorous separation of evaluative and emotive dispositions from cognitive and positivistic orientations.  [Wilson, 1982:150]

Whatever traditional religious categories review procedures employ, such as referencing tasks by an appeal to descriptions of ministry based on the ordinal, or subsuming the whole process within the bounds of episcopal oversight, it remains essentially rationalistic, factual and functionalist in orientation.  Hall’s report [Hall, 1999] for the Diocese of Liverpool makes the secular instrumentalist pedigree of clergy appraisal quite explicit,

Appraisal comes to the Church from the world of business where performances may be judged against job descriptions, agreed targets or general ‘performance indicators’. [1999:92]

It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the same report discovered that a minority of clergy in the diocese studied (somewhere between less than 10 per cent and no more than 18 per cent) believed appraisal to be an intrusive imposition of inappropriate business techniques [Hall, 1999:93].  The report asserts that those expressing such discomfort are unlikely ever to be happy with a review system, and consequently the report disregards this section of the clergy when it comes to the formulation of recommendations.  I am not sure is wise to simply and sanguinely set aside such reservations, instead should it not be asked what such hesitations might mean.  Those who make such an explicit criticism of review/appraisal may well be voicing a concern that goes to the heart of ministerial practice that needs to be acknowledged.

            Hall draws an interesting comparison between the reticence about the notion of clergy appraisal in some quarters of the Church and similar reservations expressed about the appraisal of academics in universities [93].  Such reservations often dismiss appraisal procedures as “mere managerialism” that threatens a collegial sense of shared community, professionalism, and mutual respect.  Alongside the sense of threat there emerges a certain nostalgia for the “old boys(!) network” that previously kept everything going without recourse to formal procedures of accountability, except on the rare occasions when things went wrong.  The sexist undertones of such reservations, coupled with the hidden and too often unchallengeable exercise of power they represent, means that objections couched in these terms are unlikely to be vigorously voiced in public.  Nevertheless they are markers that signify a crucial ambiguity in the implementation of review procedures, namely that the rational instrumentality required of the process is of itself corrosive of fundamental aspects of the role being examined.  Knowledge, competence and effective performance are , of course, essential components in an individual’s academic or ministerial practice, and it would be folly indeed to dismiss as useless measurable and reflective examination of these matters, but such objectivized categories can never contain an account of all that is essential to those roles.  The popular suspicion of occupational groups as tending to be self-serving mutual interest lobbies that guard their own well-being before meeting the needs of wider society makes it difficult for this point to be heard.  Nevertheless, it remains true that the kind of rational organizational mind-set that talks in terms of aims, competencies, objectives, and outcomes, is only one perspective on, for example, the exercising of ordained ministry.  In Stephen Pattison’s words, such concepts are “the paraphernalia that pertain to managed organizations” [2000:149] and the Church although it is a managed organization cannot be adequately defined solely in such terms.  Likewise, the clergy although they most certainly do fulfil functions and tasks where performance can and should be assessed, so as to facilitate developmental learning, are also required to undertake other aspects of action and thought that do not fit easily with measurability and outcomes.  Perhaps an illustration from the practice of clergy appraisal will make the point more clearly.

            A component of most diocesan ministry review schemes is some kind of preparatory document that is completed by the appraisee prior to an in-depth interview.  This document encourages the appraisee to formally analyse her or his own ministerial practice by giving a written response to a series of questions.  The following questionnaire, drawn from the Chester Diocesan Ministry Review Scheme, is not untypical:

            Figure i

            [Chester, Diocese of, 2000]

On initial reading this questionnaire discloses what appears to be a “matter-of-fact” and “commonsensical” approach to the practice of ministry.  The appraisee is simply asked to think on tasks, priorities, actions, and plans in terms of her or his personal activity which is the principal focus of the particular scheme in which this document is used.  The very practicality of the questions, and their mundane quality, obscures the fact that a very particular style of thinking is being asked of the respondent. 

The tenor of the document fits closely with what in management theory is called “strategy formulation”.  The following table presents the essential components of such formulation from one popular management textbook [Daft, 1989] with the number of the questions from the Chester document that most closely corresponds with that particular topic.  The categories from Daft are about corporate planning yet they present an insightful overlap with the personal planning of the ministry review document:

Figure ii

Strategising thought gives predominance to three elements of analysis, namely rational calculation, assessment of resources and constraints, and planning for achievement [Jenkins, 1992:83].  All these components figure prominently in the formalities of developmental ministerial review.  That very prominence is cause for concern since it works to include everything that people do within the limits of rational, calculating, and instrumental categories.  Strategic thinking simply claims too much for itself.  The fact that the military and business thinking from which the concept is drawn is of relatively modern vintage should prompt some consideration of what other ways of thinking it has displaced.  The ubiquity of strategic thinking in contemporary society works to mask more traditional ways of accounting for human action, such as tradition itself, instinct, mutuality, and expression of meaning.  Strategizing focuses on outcomes, but to view all human active solely in terms of outcomes dramatically curtails human possibilities.  In a corporate setting strategic thinking becomes the rhetoric that assists a sense of collective action and purpose, but when applied too all-embracingly to an individual’s practice it can be constraining and potentially de-motivating.  Where that individual’s practice is subsumed within institutional religious practice that itself relies upon inherited tradition, over-reliance on strategic thinking can be highly corrosive.  Bourdieu’s [1977, 1990] alternative use of the concept “strategy” provides the beginnings of an account of why that is likely to be the case.

            Confusingly, Bourdieu’s uses the term strategising in a way completely different from the calculating, ends directed and rational process described about.  To understand this usage the term needs to be located within his understanding of practical knowledge.  According to Bourdieu, practice itself has a logic to it that is not that of logic [Bourdieu, 1977].  In other words, practice cannot be wholly subsumed into categories of conscious, organized and calculated thought, but then neither is it random or simply accidental behaviour.  In practice, one thing does follow on from another, but in a way that is more than “just happenings”.  In Bourdieu’s terminology this is “practical logic,” which he often describes in terms of the metaphor of a “feel for the game,” that mastery that is born of the inherent necessities of the game and the practitioner’s experience of it, which works outside conscious control and objective discourse, but remains part of the learned repertoire.  For most of us, most of the time, this logic of practice is taken for granted.  We do not think about it because we do not need to, indeed social existence would become impossible were we to constantly question it.  Bourdieu distinguishes his perspective from both objectivist and phenomenological understandings that require a distancing of subject and object.  He refers to this practical knowledge as doxa or “doxic experience”:

…the coincidence of the objective structures and the internalized structures which provides the illusion of immediate understanding, characteristic of practical experience of the familiar universe, and which at the same time excludes from that experience any inquiry as to its own conditions of possibility. [Bourdieu, 1990:20]

The apparent “givenness” of practical logic discloses another of its characteristics, namely its fluidity and indeterminacy.  It is of necessity improvisatory, rather than being accomplished on the basis of rules and normative models for how could there possibly be a rule for every conceivable social circumstance?  Practice is therefore an “art;” it requires constantly improvised performance.  To acknowledge that improvisation is not to suggest that practice is without purposes, and this is where strategising comes in.

            Bourdieu absolutely rejects the simple move from rules to strategies of structuralism.  Instead he says that actors pursue goals and interests through their practical sense or logic that is itself born of their own experience of reality.  Strategising becomes in his terminology an interplay of factors learnt and being learnt, through which an actor knows - without knowing in a rational, calculating way - the right thing to do.  The cultural “givenness” of a situation, an individual’s competency, resource constraints, personal idiosyncrasies, unintended consequences, and personal and group history, all come together in strategising.  Strategy becomes the consequent interaction of the dispositions of social actors and the constraints and possibilities within any discreet field of social activity.  It is not that people apply rules, rather these interactions are successfully accomplished as “second nature” because people recognise the usual pattern of how things come about.  Strategies are neither conscious decision making and outcome planning, nor determining unconscious programmes and processes.  For Bourdieu, strategies are generated and pursued within an organising framework of dispositions that cannot be objectivized without totally obscuring the real nature of practical logic.  In Outline of a Theory of Practice he asserts,

It is because subjects do not, strictly speaking know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning than they know. [1977: 79]

This brief account of an aspect of Bourdieu’s thought needs expanding, hopefully however, the discussion offered here presents sufficient material to make it reasonable to suggest that the imposition of overly rationalistic processes into the way an account is given of ministerial practice may be inimical to fundamental aspects of that practice.

Clergy review and appraisal procedure must tread the narrow line between an amorphous and open-ended estimation of practice that too easily degenerates into platitudes, or a rationalistic and functional focus on outcomes that stultifies ministry.  Bourdieu’s interesting use of the religious expression doxa (literally “glory”) in designating the way practical knowledge transcends the objective-subjective divide is suggestive of a process fundamental to religious experience.  Bourdieu writes of all practice, but if his insights are accepted as accurate they must apply with particular weight to the religious practitioner, and to the religious ministerial practitioner.  Religious practice of its essence requires that mentality which indwells its tradition and goes beyond what is reasonable to know.  The danger of strategic thought, in the organizations theory use of that expression, is that it makes religious practice too small.  In this the very taken-for-grantedness of such instrumental categories make them all the more dangerous.  The very commonsensical nature of outcome planning, resource assessment and rational analysis of activity encourages a perspective on belief and ministry that limits vision creation in spite of its vaunted purpose of just such vision building.  The almost visceral reaction against clergy appraisal of those cited by Hall [1999] echoes Dawn and Peterson’s [2000] estimation of the American experience:

The pastoral dimensions of the church’s leadership are badly eroded by technologizing and managerial influences.  The theological dimensions of the church’s leadership have been marginalized by therapeutic and marketing preoccupations. […]  Rationalism and functionalism, both of them reductive, have left pastoral theology thin and anaemic. [Dawn and Peterson, 2000:60]

Ministerial review and development planning schemes that are too at home with instrumental methods of analysing ministerial practice are likely to compound the negative effects of social changes.  If practical logic is indeed a disposition born of the complexities of experience and tradition, and if much in contemporary society devalues the disposition of traditionally expressed Christian belief and practice, then appraisal procedures that underplay that disposition learning will further erode the significance of religious practice.  Although the manifest function of strategic thinking in appraisal schemes is to enable an increase in ministerial effectiveness, its latent function may work in a quite contrary way. 

            The criticism offered here of instrumental analysis of ministerial practice does not mean that all such rational examination of clergy activity is out of place.  This discussion could be interpreted as a plea for a return to continuing ministerial formation that dwells exclusively on the distinctive qualities of priesthood and the religious tradition, but that is not the intention.  What is being argued is that review procedures as applied and planned too often utilise in an uncritical and ultimately unhelpful manner models drawn from other arenas of human endeavour.  Those models may have utility within review of ministerial practice if they are used in a more reflexive and critical manner, but to be so used they will require supporting supervisory structures and financial resourcing far beyond anything so far envisaged in the Church of England.   Without such resourcing, it may well be much more effective (and cost effective) to focus on the promotion of individual learning plans through coaching and mentoring.

Christopher Burkett

Bibliography

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Chester, Diocese of

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