Jesus said, “Feed my sheep”.
“It’s just mushroomed – all the admin and process.”
This week I bumped in to a vicar I know from a different part of the country, and asked him how things were in the parishes he serves. This was the first thing he said! Much of his time is now consumed by the paperless paperwork which accompanies us everywhere. He wades a swamp of regulations, audit, reviews, policies, recording and risk assessments.
All readers will resonate with this: it’s universal. The cause? Writing in Thursday’s Times, columnist Juliet Samuel traces at least some back to the UK government in the 2000s, pushing out laws “that were often intended to make the system fairer and more efficient but have instead swamped it with documentation, auditing and quasi-legal processes.” To this one might add the tech that means that large amounts of paperwork can now be sent out without having to pay for postage or photocopying. Red tape has become part of the culture, with the growth of entire industries of regulators.
In the churches, an extra layer has come through safeguarding, which has quite rightly had to be improved very significantly.
This red tape culture comes at a cost. Just as our streets seem to be increasingly lawless because police officers are stuck behind screens, ministers of the gospel of grace can be chained to admin when Jesus tells us to feed His sheep. For the minister of a smaller church this can be a massive use of time which should be spent praying, studying, visiting, training and preaching. In a larger staff team such as we are blessed with, we’ve had to reduce pastoral staff while increasing the office team (who are, may I say, quite brilliant). Even with their great help, the process load on those in leadership remains significant. In the past year, several of our church council meetings have had over a hundred pages of pre-reading.
This does not advantage anyone. Who wants their minister to preach from a desiccated soul, no longer reading books and with less time to see people, pray, study and evangelise? How much of our collective energy as a church gets diverted to this?
Maybe I’m an oldie, grumpy about the way today’s world works. But please hear me, for my generation can remember a time when we genuinely did have more time to pray, to train people, to prepare our talks, to study and wrestle with big questions, to plan for church planting, to meet people 1-1, to see and encourage other church leaders, to do personal evangelism and more. I repeat: Jesus said, “Feed my sheep”.
Going back yet further, read the journals of the great eighteenth-century pastor John Newton, and see how much he got done in a pre-red-tape world! He gave his whole time to study, prayer, visiting, preaching and corresponding. The effects: revival, growth and blessing to many.
It will be hard to find a way back from this, because of the expectations imposed on us. But we do need to acknowledge the real costs of this culture, and challenge it where we can. I’m beyond grateful for our own office team, so ably led, who are actively trying to do what they can locally to shrink the burden. Let’s all pray for them, and about what has, nationally, become a serious problem for our churches.
