The new development in the church which can only be good news
Woking was delighted by the news that the new Archbishop of Canterbury is to be Dame Sarah Mullally, currently Bishop of London, and who was born and raised in our town, an alumnus of Winston Churchill School and Woking College. Bishop Sarah has proudly announced her Surrey roots whenever she has been asked. One thing which makes me depressed about some of the coverage since the announcement is the instinctive negativity of some of my colleagues in Christian leadership. In general, this comes from an honest position. If I am asked a straight question, I want to give a straight answer. If someone asks me what I think of the new Archbishop, I will tell them, honestly; the problems begin when we’re having these conversations in public. Your immediate response can and will be saved, recorded for posterity and can be served up and amplified by social media for years to come, especially if you have something challenging to say.
One former Archdeacon of Dorking, Paul Bryer, used social media every day and had some top tips for Christian leaders. One of these which I adopted is to only say positive things about other people on social media. Not every Christian observes this and, when I have raised it with fellow participants in social media, they have not always agreed, but I find it helpful to do it for a number of reasons. Human brains are hard wired to hear and respond to negative feedback more quickly and easily than we hear and respond to positive feedback. Psychologists tell us that it takes ten times as long to remember a positive thing someone has said to you than a negative thing. I can go away from a service where ten people have said nice things and one person was critical; which comment will I be chewing over along with my lunch? The negative one, of course. Social media algorithms work like this. And anyone who has been connected to news journalism can tell you that that works the same way. The old axiom, ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ is true. For every positive story in the media, there are several other negative ones. So there is precious little good news reported. Christians, however, are gospel people. We are called to be good news to our communities. That is radically different from the culture. Sadly, what I observe on social media is that Christians, who are often incredibly kind and gracious in everyday life, can be just as vicious and unpleasant to fellow Christians on social media as the rest of the world. The social media algorithm pulls us downward into a spiral of negativity and unkindness.
Thus I find it more helpful to only say positive things online, plus, as the co-author of The Usborne Guide to Email, I try to stick to the golden rule of online communication, which was true in the 1990s at the birth of the internet and is also true now: Do not write anything online which you would not like to be in put up in large print on a notice board in a public place where you work or live. Think about the number of Christian leaders (myself included) who have come unstuck because of something they said digitally which was unnecessary. I do not recall Christian leaders getting into trouble for being too kind and pleasant on social media! And so I recommend speaking well of each other online, and this goes for our new Archbishop too. As my grandmother might have said, ‘If you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything.’
Church leadership is a bit like being a Prime Minister, headteacher or football manager: everybody has an opinion about how you’re doing your job, and everybody has ideas about how you could do it better, and at the same time, nobody really wants to do the job because they recognise that it’s incredibly hard and they don’t want the flak which goes with it. There is a lot of truth in the thought that the people you want most to be bishops are the people who least want to do the job. Archbishop of Canterbury is the hardest job in British public life; the incumbent deserves to receive grace and kindness from those they would expect to be on their side.
The Christian commentator Andrew Brown wrote recently about the short honeymoon that our new Archbishop can expect simply because she is different from the last one, which will be closely followed by disillusionment and disappointment when she starts to say or do things with which we don’t agree or which we don’t like. I often say that leadership is the art of disappointing people at a rate they can cope with! Christians can do better than the world, with its instinctive and predictable negativity.
What, then, could Christians of all different convictions say positively about our new Archbishop? Sarah is a woman of deep faith and comparatively humble roots. It is very rare that both of our Church of England Archbishops have been state educated like the majority of us. Sarah is well liked across the very diverse range of Christian views embodied by London Diocese, and that has consistently been the one diocese in England which has grown, and grown rapidly, over the last few years. She is a clear communicator and has stood up publicly for a variety of moral and ethical positions, most notably in recent times leading the bishops in the House of Lords in their unanimous opposition to assisted suicide. She has the benefit of a distinguished career in nursing to back this up. I know several vicars who were previously nurses. They make good pastors: they are bracingly realistic about the human condition, unafraid to tell things as they really are and practical and pragmatic when it comes to offering workable solutions. They are not afraid of the mess and fuss which comes at various stages of life, and they will roll up their sleeves and get on with making it better.
Undoubtedly, there are plenty of negative things I could also say. However, I have yet to meet another Christian (or indeed another human) with whom I share every point of view and agree with everything they say. Like most experienced leaders, I don’t even agree with everything I have said and done in the past; I have learned my most valuable lessons from my toughest times and biggest blunders. One thing to notice over the next few years, as with the first woman to occupy any public role, will be things that people say about Sarah which they would not say if she was a man. What I can and do pledge to Archbishop-designate Sarah is what I pledged to my Bishop when I was licenced in my current role: to obey them in all things lawful and honest, to pray for her and to aim for all my words and actions to be offered in a positive, kind and prayerful spirit.