A Church leader – you can’t mean me?

A transcript of a speech given by Paul McClintock at the MAM Conference, 22 July 2019

This Conference draws on the wisdom of Mary Aikenhead and Ignatius Loyola as we seek to find practical ways to draw our ministries to a closer and deeper relationship with God. My remarks pick up that theme from where Fr David Ransom left off at our last Conference when, challenging us with an inclusive Vatican II understanding of the church, he stated that if you are a leader in Mary Aikenhead Ministries you are a leader of the Church. He put it to us that this is not just an option – our only real choice is whether to embrace that leadership role and how to exercise it. My topic – A church Leader – you can’t mean me? – is my account as a director of St Vincent’s Health grappling with that challenge, unhindered by any ecclesiastical qualifications, and looks at what are the barriers, the motivations and the early impact of that choice. It follows that these comments are entirely personal but I feel seeking the Magis without answering that question may miss some of the richness of the quest.

Let me start by saying that I, like you, earn my living by leading, and I enjoy it. I think I do it well – I know many of you and you do it very well. I also have a lived experience of the Church, whatever the frustrations, of the most extraordinary love and generosity. It is an amazing pillar of strength for what is best in our society, and many of the people I have met – clerics, religious and lay – some of whom are here in this room – have astonished me with their devotion, and love – to their God and to all of us. They have nurtured me, educated me, married and buried my close ones, and been there when I have needed them most. My experience is littered with exceptional leaders I have met or observed through the Church, and my life has been hugely enriched by them.

Then I add my experience of Mary Aikenhead from my pilgrimage to Ireland and the extraordinary achievements of the Order she founded, and the Values of the Mary Aikenhead Ministries we will discuss over this Conference. This lived experience leaves me with a sense of awe and gratitude.

So to be told that you are a leader of this very Church – carrying out a function you enjoy for an organisation you admire more than any other – should be fabulous news. We should have all said thank you to David, and thrown ourselves into the task with joy.

But I didn’t find it that easy, and perhaps neither did some of you. So I thought I should ask why?  My view was that the church leadership I had apparently joined was struggling, but I thought of “them” struggling”, not “us” – certainly not “me”. I had even started to blame “them” for dropping the ball, as if I was observing a tragedy to which I had bought tickets – and ones well down the back of the hall. I doubted whether that felt like leadership.

The thought that I might be part of the problem persisted through the year. On the Epiphany we were at Mass in the tiny church in Arrowtown in New Zealand, blessed for being a place where St Mary of the Cross, Mary McKillop, taught.  Fr Jaime was telling that most loved story – the Magi responding to the call, making the perilous journey, crossing cultures with little knowledge of outcome, and arriving in Jerusalem where they encounter the religious leaders of the day who know the answers to their questions and do nothing but send them on. The leaders are spectators in the story, probably sceptical of whether these new foreigners will add value, fearful of social pressure not to get involved.

So where do I fit in – do I watch our church – and of course I mean the whole Christian Church whatever the denomination, as the call to leadership applies to all - go through an extraordinary period of challenge sitting back in Jerusalem, or do I choose to go on the perilous and uncertain journey to Bethlehem?

Later in the year we read about Samuel, famously called three times by God and just not getting it – referring the question each time to the local hierarchy, the old prophet Eli, who finally understands with some reluctance that God has moved on and requires new leadership. The Bible is full of these moments, even if the voice of God is not so clear in most. Are we facing a Samuel moment, and are we called by a new Star?

And when Tessa Ho asked us recently in a workshop to answer “why” we all carry out these ministries was one of my most deeply held responses that I have leadership responsibilities to the Church which I must meet?

Before answering why a joyful response to this leadership challenge seems so hard I should acknowledge that I am describing my point on the journey – I know many of you are way ahead of me. Some have spent lives where the impact on the Church of what you do is clear – but even there it may be good to assess again what does it mean to be a leader of the Church in 2019, and how do I intend to play that broader role to the best of my ability?

Barriers to Leadership

So I thought if I named a few of my barriers to accepting a leadership role that may help me deal with them, and perhaps help you. They turned out to be a really mixed bag.

We have all grown up in a highly paternalistic church, both male and hierarchical, that looks after everything for us. I wonder whether the decision making bit of my religious brain has atrophied, though lack of exercise. I complain about this, but have got used to it – perhaps we all enjoy a little not having to worry too much about the big issues – or many of the small ones.

Then there are people in the highest positions in the structure who we are not sure will welcome us as we embrace our post Vatican II roles – there is a danger we will be rejected. Our top leader Pope Francis, to whom Mary Aikenhead Ministries is accountable, appears open to our arrival and has even invited us, but there are quite a few layers between us and him.

Then there remains a part of my brain that says this is no place for amateurs – the church must be led by professionals.  Or we know we are wounded souls, and there is no place in leadership for those – when the Pope chose “I am a sinner” as the best description of his humanity I was not meant to take it literally. Jesus saved a woman from being stoned by his knowledge that all are sinners, but again that can’t apply here surely when leadership is at stake.

And then of course if we do jump in the way ahead is unclear, and contested. Just read the views put to the Plenary Council team, including those of our Catholic university student organisations, and you are reminded of the spread of opinions, many buttressed by Divine certainty.

Now you can all identify your own unique set of barriers, and they will all be good reasons to dodge the bullet. But they all end up with the understanding that Church leadership is really hard today – the reaction of most of us to the idea that we are called in this way is to flee – to deny – to delay. It just seems too hard to fit into our busy lives, and we will get around to thinking about it when we have more time.

All this got me to the view that the Church is certainly worth leading, but there a lots of reasons why it can’t mean me. I had analysed the barriers, and I needed to get them out of the way so my leadership role can play out in my life and in particular in my ministry.

Motivation

It seemed to me that the key was motivation and there were two elements in deciding whether to accept this difficult challenge – firstly does it mean enough to me to move it to the top of my competing priorities – do I care enough – and secondly does the church need my particular contribution at this time?

So our first element is do we care enough, and the answer is very individual. For me I went back to the most basic sequence of five questions:

• do I think I have a spiritual side

• does it need nurturing like my physical side

• does Christ give me the best framework to do that

• is it done best in a community that journeys together and seeks to preserve and hand on that tradition; and

• do I really believe that community makes God still present in the world, and that the Spirit remains to give us hope when all looks pretty grim?

 My personal answer to that whole sequence was yes – each one of you will answer them in your own way, or have different questions altogether. But I do feel that if you are a leader in these ministries you have to find your own way of finding out whether you care enough, and why?

On the basis that we establish that we care enough the second element asks whether the church needs our leadership, and that can be answered without forcing you to decide whether to speak only in Latin from now on, or whether we must eliminate all gender or marital restrictions to church leadership by the close of business. Those may be excellent topics for leaders to discuss over time, but my question is the preliminary one of whether we accept the obligation to lead at all.

It seems to me that one feature that unites the church in this country today is a shared view that Church leadership has failed to live up to the challenge of presenting Christ here and present in the Australian community, with joy and confidence. Sadly that shared critical view is rarely linked to any assessment of individual responsibility of the person making the judgment – as I said at the beginning we are largely talking about “their” failure, not really “ours” let alone “mine”.

Which brings me to the insight I have found personally most challenging – our society has lost trust and respect for the role we in the Church play, and our inability to convey the joy of our Christian community and its extraordinary impact on our society, both now and in the past, and the relevance of Christ at the centre of those efforts, has put this wonderful part of what makes the world so special at serious risk. In business terms I think it may be one of the worst brand efforts ever seen – we have a remarkable product, which everyone in this room works so hard to deliver, and we have become unable to defend it. With recent tensions and failures I think we may have got even worse, with the temptation to fall back to a view that the Church should be promoted primarily as a social welfare organisation – as if there were two disconnected churches instead of one!

 Of course the reason that this is the most challenging insight for me is that this is not a failure that can be left at the feet of the bishops alone – it lies with all of us. It lies with me. As long as we define the church in terms of someone else’s failures we dig the hole deeper, as it reflects a view of the Church where we are the spectators, back in Jerusalem watching events play out with grim acceptance of its sad end.

This challenge is not temporary. We all admire the Indigenous aural tradition of faithfully handing on their traditions and stories, and in some ways each generation of Christians has the same task of handing on the Church, its beliefs and its stories. Christ cannot come and go from the world – he must remain always, and we have the task of keeping him here and handing him on. That is our responsibility and it transcends the personal journey of faithfully living the gospel values. We lead the church, in part, to ensure it survives, just as generations have done, often in sterner times, for two thousand years.

My conclusion is that the Church matters profoundly, and it urgently needs all of us to lead.

Heading towards answers

So how is that discernment affecting my approach to St Vincent’s Health, and beyond in my other activities and leadership roles? I admit this is work in progress, and today I want to focus on attitudes rather than on new tasks to perform.

A starting point is an attitude of optimism as I know that leadership does not work from despair – I have never been inspired by gloom. Pope Francis warned in his first letter that leadership does not come from those “who are dejected, discouraged, impatient, or anxious, but from those who have received the joy of Christ”. So if I want to lead I must stop seeing myself as a spectator and get on with exciting the teams I work with about what we see that inspires us. In our ministries there is so much to inspire – material to burn. But if we look across the whole Church there is so much more, if we just open our eyes to it.

Another attitude is knowing that being in a deep hole is not always all bad. I read the great new biography of Churchill over Christmas, and was attracted to a speech he gave to his old school at Harrow during the worst of the war, when all was very grim indeed. He did not avoid the pain and danger of the present, but he made the point that the generation before him in that hall would change the course of world history, much for the better, and so it did. We know that a church in trouble is a church that needs us more, and may perhaps be more willing to listen and change. Surely we can see this in Archbishop Coleridge’s question of “how we might forge a church culture that is more accountable, more transparent and more inclusive”, and also in Archbishop Comensoli’s Patrick Oration.

It is also clear that we need to recognise there is a mismatch between the inspiring stories of the church and its public face, and that much of our best work is hidden. A school principal, or a hospital head, may have more authority in some areas than a cleric to represent the joy and achievement of the church, and they all need to be heard – and space made for them. So we also need to be willing to talk out ourselves when we are the best person to be heard.

I actually think the  most urgent and important attitude of leadership is that we must master the art of humbly acknowledging our failures, continuing to debate robustly areas where change may be required, and defending the inspired work we do and the truly amazing people – including our clergy and religious – who do it.  You may say it is impossible to do all three together – I would say that none have any chance without the other two. I could give a whole speech just on this, but today let me say we just have to get a lot better at all three. If we do not we will stumble out of our decades of introspection brought on by our proper desire to show repentance for failure such as our terrible record on sexual abuse and our need to find our way through structural reform, and find by then no one else cares. Real leaders know you cannot do things in neat sequence – we have to excite and inspire while we repent and reform.

And if leaders take on this view of their role they will need to accept a level of vulnerability. I address many audiences during a year, but this is more personal. For me that is a moment of vulnerability, out of my comfort zone, and I have a feeling that comfort zones might be limited on this road.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I have focused on leadership attitudes because we share them already - everyone in this room knows how to lead. Decisions on how they play out in our lives are very personal and not a place for me to go. We are all leaders in our respective roles already, so we get what to do and how to act – we bring huge experience to the task. And then we do believe that the task calls on power well beyond our human talents, so we are right to know our efforts will make a profound difference – and we will feel at peace with our roles.

And if you think attitudes will not make much difference look at current issues through the lens of the spectator or the leader – try the Plenary Council for a start. I expect there will be many more such challenges over the coming years.

So all this means that as I seek “the more” in my ministry I will do so knowing that my role with these ministries carries with it a share of the leadership of the Church, and when I finish I should be judged not only on my contribution to St Vincent’s, but also as a leader of Mary Aikenhead Ministries and of the whole Church. I am not sure I know where that will take me, but of course the whole concept of Magis is not about arriving, but seeking and striving – so perhaps that is where we all need to be.

Thank you.