Searching through my old computer files this morning, I came across this: the text of a Lent talk that I gave at St.Gabriel's, Heaton in 2004! It develops ideas that I began thinking about after completing my PhD on late medieval monastic administration.
(warning: this is long!)
Your Work and Your Spirituality
Your
work and your spirituality. That could cover a whole range of things,
so I’ll start by saying what I’m not going to be talking about.
I’m not going to be talking about the kind of work that we can
easily understand as vocational – about being a teacher or doctor
or nurse or priest. Not about specifically paid work. And not about
how to pray for or at work, even. I’m talking here about dull,
routine, boring, humdrum work, and how we see it. What has it got to
do with God? Because if we don’t really think our work has
anything to do with God, it can’t fit into our spirituality at all,
we can’t pray for it with integrity and we end up feeling that we
have two selves, a religious self that goes to church, prays for
friends and maybe sits on the PCC, and a secular self that goes to
work. This is true even if we aren’t actually working, are
unemployed or retired. If collecting a pension, checking the heating
bill and dusting behind the cupboards is nothing to do with God, we
are only half people of God – or maybe rather less than half. So I
want to talk tonight about what work has to do with God. And the test
case for a theology of work (to give it its grand title), is what we
think about routine administration – paperwork. Even those teachers
and nurses whose jobs we think are easily part of God’s plan have a
problem here - Hospitals and schools are always complaining about the
rise in paperwork. And we all have to do it even if we’re retired
with only ourselves to look after – we still have to pay bills,
deal with council tax demands and electoral roll forms, etc. So our
question tonight is really, where is God in paperwork? Or what has
paperwork got to do with God?
There is a tendency in the press and in theological
circles too to decry bureaucracy and paperwork as a function of
modern life, and to hark back to a fictitious ‘golden age’ in
which people undertook ‘real work’. This sort of idea really took
hold with the Victorian Gothic revival, and the Arts and Crafts
movement, with people like William Morris, was part of an attempt to
get back to this pre-industrial golden age of real craftsmanship and
proper work.
But this kind of view of the past is unsustainable when
the realities of medieval life are examined. It is clear from a close
reading of history that a large administrative burden is by no means
a new phenomenon. (my phd, etc. parish registers; monastic accounts;
household accounts etc. Development of writing in Ancient world,
pre-Biblical, seems to have happened as a function of the need to
keep accounts!) Since administrative work is so ubiquitious, it is
worth devoting some consideration to how it should best be approached
and understood theologically, as something all Christians have to do.
In this talk I’m going to firstly look at
administration in the bible, and then look briefly at the history of
the church and the impact that has had on our understanding of work
as part of the Christian life. I’m then going to suggest that there
are four main ways of understanding paperwork theologically, and
briefly outline each one, looking at the strengths and weaknesses of
each.
Administration
in the Bible
On the whole, the Old Testament has more to say about
the practical details of administration than the New. In keeping with
its emphasis on the story of a people, issues of good government such
as taxation, record keeping, and food storage and distribution are
scattered throughout the Old Testament. The most famous example is
probably the story of Joseph in Genesis, which has as its turning
point Joseph’s advice to Pharoah to ‘appoint commissioners over
the land to take a fifth of the harvestof Egypt during the seven
years of abundance…to be held in reserve for the country, to be
used during the seven years of famine’ (Genesis 41: 34-36).
Secretarial and accountancy work are implicitly assumed in many
episodes, such as in the long and detailed lists of the materials
used in the construction of the tent of meeting and its furnishings
in Exodus 35-9 and in the census described in Numbers 26.
Administrators and their tasks are also mentioned explicitly on
occasion, such as in 1 Kings 4:1-28, which lists all King Solomon’s
officials, including secretaries and a recorder, and also records the
daily provisions required by the royal household and who was
responsible for providing these things.
Because
the Old Testament presents the story of a people as the record of
God’s activity in the world, it is generally holistic in its
approach to life. This is of course an overly sweeping statement, and
the different books of the Old Testament clearly present many
different approaches. Nevertheless, a spirituality can be discerned
throughout the Old Testament writings which treats the whole of life
as the religious sphere. Questions of what to eat, what to wear, who
to marry and generally of how to live one’s day to day life are not
set aside from the religious aspect of life but are seen as
comprising it. The purity laws of Leviticus, and the sayings of
Proverbs, for example, make no distinction between their moral,
ritual and common sense instructions. Administration at all levels
and in all guises, from good government of the nation, to faithfully
copying the book of the law, to accurately accounting for every
shekel donated to the construction of the tabernacle, was thus simply
one more aspect of every day life which was done under God.
Turning
to the New Testament, this sense of administration being a natural
part of human life can be seen in the gospels, though less so in the
other books. Jesus is frequently recorded in the gospels to have used
imagery and examples drawn from the worlds of business, accountancy
and administration. Many of the great parables use this sort of
imagery, to powerful effect. For example, the parable of the talents
(Matt 25:14-30) tells the story of a master delegating
administrative powers to his servants and then settling accounts with
them. Whilst the point made in this story has become a commonplace in
our society, this was by no means the case at the time the story was
first told. Well-known rabbinic maxims and parables clearly taught
that burial was the best means of safeguarding money which had been
given to you on trust; the idea of speculating with it would
probably, therefore, have been regarded as wildly irresponsible.
Jesus was not therefore simply using the language of commerce and
administration to give background colour to his story, but rather was
drawing a substantial example from the business world of his day.
Other parables do seem to use business imagery in a more
illustrative, rather than a substantive, way. In the parable of the
unmerciful servant (Matt 18:23-35), Jesus uses the example of a king
settling accounts with his servants to emphasise his teaching on
forgiveness, whilst the parable of the tenants (Luke 20:9-16) uses
the idea of an absentee landlord being defrauded by his tenants to
make several indirect points, such as about Jesus’s identity as
God’s son. Sometimes the expected paradigms of the business world
are deliberately subverted for ironic effect, as in the humorous
parable of the shrewd manager or the dishonest servant (Luke
16:1-12), in which a sacked manager is praised for safeguarding his
own future by some well-directed corruption. Jesus’s frequent and
neutral use of such imagery gives the impression that these
administrative activities were considered a natural part of human
life. The only point at which such activities are critiqued are when
they take place in the Temple. This is in stark contrast with the
modern tendency to talk down such activites as inherently sinful.
Similarly, the need for effective administration appears to have been
well recognised in the early church. The communitarian ideal outlined
in Acts 2:42-47 and 4:32-35 clearly required some degree of
organisation, and although this is not at first spelt out the need to
reform it is made explicit in the appointment of the seven in Acts
6:1-6. This episode provides a rare glimpse of the mechanics of early
church organisation, and whether this represents an historical
reality or an ideal that Luke wishes to present, it is notable that
the prayerful and efficient administration of such practical matters
as the administration of alms is considered worthy of mention as an
important part of the establishment of the early church. Barrett
argues that what Luke intends to communicate to his reader in Acts
6:1-6 is precisely that ‘a minor deficiency in administration is
immediately set right…and the consequence is a great increase in
the number of believers.’
The
only other mention of administration in the New Testament comes in
one of Paul’s lists of spiritual gifts, in 1 Cor.12:28: ‘in the
church God has appointed first of all apostles, second prophets,
third teachers, then workers of miracles, also those having gifts of
healing, those able to help others, those with gifts of
administration, and those speaking in different kinds of tongues.’
The greek word translated here as ‘those with gifts of
administration’ is which
literally refers to steersmen, pilots or captains. This term, and
that immediately preceding it, have puzzled generations of
commentators since they do not appear in other lists of spiritual
gifts and seem to be of a different order to the other gifts that
they appear alongside. The Vulgate and early modern translations into
the vernacular such as the King James Version, rendered
as
‘governments’.
Contemporary commentators tend to give more weight to
the naval basis of .
as referring to ‘the ability to hold the helm of the church’,
perhaps leadership or vision, but the most detailed studies have
agreed that practical leadership skills are the point here, with Paul
deliberately setting the practical skills of leadership alongside the
more ‘spiritual’ gifts of leadership such as teaching, and
speaking in tongues, which the Corinthians were mistakenly exalting.
Administration
in the early church
Although
very little evidence survives about the running of the early church
it is clear that it was highly organised and that individuals were
appointed to specific roles with particular administrative
responsibilities. For early Christianity, however, there was a clear
tension between the practical and the spiritual. Part of the church’s
coming to terms with the continued failure of the expected end times
to arrive was a need to understand how Christianity could be lived
out in society.
On a practical note, too, administration becomes
necessary with the acquisition of property, even if it is only used
to give that property away again as speedily and fairly as possible
(as in Acts). Whilst the church had certainly had property prior to
Constantine’s conversion, the amount involved increased
dramatically in the years and centuries following. Property belonging
to the church which had been confiscated under the various
persectutions was restored, and Constantine himself – along, no
doubt, with many others – made donations to the church. Over the
following centuries the church became wealthy, and in particular the
various monastic movements, begun in poverty, attracted donations of
land, money and ornamentation from members of the church who admired
their aims and hoped to benefit from their prayers. Alongside this
change in the circumstances of the church went the development not
only of administrative and legal structures, but also of theological
rationales for the church owning property at all.
The sudden shift that the church experienced on
Constantine’s conversion, from being a small beleagured minority to
suddenly becoming an approved religion and soon becoming a sine
qua non for advancement, had a profound impact on the self
understanding of the church and on its spirituality. A self
understanding based on purity and martyrdom was swiftly replaced with
one which sought to recreate that original purity by the test of
asceticism; martyrdom reinterpreted for a church that was no longer
the target of persecution. Yet the fact that the church had become
wealthy, and the fact that many wealthy people became members of the
church as it became the official state religion of the Roman Empire,
also needed to be addressed.
The phenomenon of desert monasticism and the debate
which raged over whether virginity and marriage were equally
allowable both produced a large amount of literature arguing that an
ideal Christian spirituality required freedom or withdrawal from the
day to day concerns of married life (with marriage essentially
defined as the socio-economic state of householder, rather than in
terms of sexual relationships per se). Even those who argued
that marriage could be an authentically Christian way of life were at
pains to point out the many disadvantages of the distractions of
marriage for one’s spirituality. This council of perfection had to
be reconciled with the reality of a state church of which most people
were to become members, and over the period from the late second to
the fourth century A.D. a concept of two types of Christian follower
was worked out, the first excluding marriage and property, the second
allowing a full range of interaction with society including even
involvement with the government or army.
As
the monasteries and churches acquired land and buildings so the need
grew for both effective administrative structures and a spirituality
which made sense of time devoted to such duties to be developed. The
Benedictine Rule, which grew out of this context, managed to
synthesis the material and practical with the spiritual and religious
dimensions of life. Its success in doing so can be inferred from the
fact that it has endured the test of time for around 1500 years, and
is today the guiding rule of more than 1400 Benedictine and
Cistercian communities. Benedictine spirituality offers a framework
within which the need for paperwork and administrative duties to be
undertaken by the churches’ ministers can be understood
theologically and even treasured as a spiritual discipline. Life is
to be well-ordered, even comfortable, and the discipline needed for
accounting for tools and managing land is seen as part of the
discipline needed for living in community, which in turn is
understood as the best way to become as God intended us to be.
Benedict’s rule spends as much time on the practical ordering of
the monastery as on its prayer life, refusing to draw a distinction
between the two.
This sense of the holiness of
daily life is of course not exclusively Benedictine. It does,
however, seem strangely inappropriate that a sense of the holiness
and the idea of a spirituality of daily life should have been largely
the preserve of monastic communities rather than the laity! I guess
the women looking after twelve children and a farmyard whilst getting
on with being Christians were just too busy to go about writing down
how they did it.
Typology
Overall, I want to suggest that there are broadly four
ways of understanding administration theologically, one negative and
three approaches which are positive to varying degrees. The first of
these is a ‘rejectionist’ approach. This is typically
characterised by a suspicion of society and of all the trappings of
participation in society, and in particular by a radical rejection of
wealth and property. Those taking this view would tend to criticise
all time spent on administrative tasks or worldly work as a
distraction from higher things, and to reject attempts at better
church administration as being a sign of the church compromising with
the standards of the world. This approach can be seen throughout
Christian history, and in many ways has right on its side. It
certainly provides a powerful corrective to the human tendency to be
seduced by wealth and power and be distracted by the pursuit of these
from our calling to live our lives in God’s service. However, as an
entire philosophy it is severely lacking, as the early church
discovered very soon; we are called to live our lives in this world,
for now at least. This approach is useful as a corrective, but must
be kept in check if it is not to become life-denying.
The first of the positive approaches to work we might
call the ‘enabling’ approach. This sees administration as
something that it is worth doing well because this will enable other
tasks to be done better or free up more time for those other tasks.
This is typical of most theological writing in the late twentieth
century on the subject of work. Typically, this advocates that the
clergy adopt time management techniques and embrace technological
advances such as word processing and accountancy software packages,
in order to enable their “real” work (their pastoral and perhaps
their liturgical duties) to be done more effectively. Although
advocates of this approach do not follow the rejectionist line of
thinking to its conclusion, nevertheless they are aware of and in
sympathy with many of its precepts, and wish to guard against the
possibility of their positive approach to worldly wisdom going too
far. They stress that ‘administration...is always secondary to the
main purpose’, that it is a means to an end.
The
third approach to administration is the ‘spiritual’
understanding. Under this heading I include the ideas that it is
important to do one’s work well, whatever it may be, in order to
honour God; that God can be encountered in any work that is done
wholeheartedly, well, and with the aim of honouring God in mind; and
finally the ascetic idea that doing unpleasant or uncongenial tasks
can be a valuable spiritual discipline, training the Christian to
deny the self. All of these ideas see spiritual value in many kinds
of work, and as such are a useful element in the Christian tradition,
which has generally had little to say about day to day life in the
workplace. Again, however, the value placed on work is essentially
secondary, as with the ‘enabling’ approach. Although this third
approach dignifies administration as a spiritual discipline and a
place where worship can happen, the positive value given to
administrative tasks is still seen as deriving from what they lead
to, rather than from any inherent value in the work itself.
So
this brings me on to the fourth approach, which I call the
‘anthropological’ understanding of work. This approach sees
inherent value in administrative work, which on this understanding
forms an essential part of what it is to be human. Human beings are
understood as inherently social creatures, and the construction of
systems and societies and their ensuing administration can then be
seen as an essential expression of our created nature, even as one
aspect of our being created in the image of God.
I
wonder if we can develop this idea – can we see God as an
administrator? For example, it might be possible to read Genesis 1
not just as about God creating, but about God as the One who also
orders, sorts, and systematises?
Each of these four approaches to administration clearly has its
merits, and a full understanding and location of our work within our
Christian lives will draw on the insights of all four. The
rejectionist approach warns of the dangers of embracing the world and
our culture without critiquing them in the light of what has been
revealed of the Kingdom. The enabling approach provides a practical
rationale for improved administration and the motivation for
continual striving for improved efficiency. The spiritual approach
provides for even the dullest tasks to be redeemed by a conscious
decision to do them well, and dignifies the common round by seeing it
as a location both for epiphanies and prayer. The anthropological
approach liberates us from thinking of our day to day administrative
tasks as inherently contradictory to our human nature and divine
calling. It means we can see our paperwork as an expression of our
human creation as social and structuring beings, and as a means of
human flourishing.
