Pitch A Comment

This appeared in the the Judgment Call column of the Financial Times on 24th October 2007

It used to be said that Unilever and Proctor & Gamble ran management training programmes to provide brand managers for each other. Years ago, a senior executive at one of those companies told me that the really canny thing to do was to recruit a proportion of duffers that he then ensured were poached by his rival. But he couldn't be sure that the other company wasn't doing the same thing. At the most senior levels, dangerously similar principles apply. And invariably there is only one top job. Big companies don't resemble meritocracies so much as medieval courts - if you're not in favour with the monarch you might as well flee ahead of execution. However talented the CEO is, other talents are going to leave, which is bound to erode shareholder value. So what can institutional shareholders do? My suggestion is to do away with the monarchies in favour of fixed-term presidencies. If CEOs had a maximum of two four-year terms to serve, it would keep everyone on their toes. Some companies would lose great CEOs after eight years, but it would be the same for everyone. And it might even bring salary packages down. Every little helps.

Posted by George Pitcher on October 29, 2007 4:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This article is an edited version of a sermon delivered by George Pitcher at the Episcopalian Church of St John's, Selkirk, on 2nd September 2007

I've long been fond of a passage in Matthew's gospel, when Jesus returns from a first-century equivalent of a lecture tour and goes home to Nazareth and does a gig in his own family synagogue. The response is far from the adulation he's enjoyed from his fan-base on the road: "Isn't this Mary's boy, the carpenter's son up the road? We know his brothers and sisters - but isn't he a bit, well, up himself?" A doubtless somewhat stung Jesus pouts and says: "A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house", more popularly paraphrased as "No man can be a prophet in his own land or in his own home."

As I say, I've admired that story because I've never had a hope of exercising my ordained ministry at home, where sceptical and satirical teenagers are wholly unimpressed by my prophecy. As are the communities where I've lived in south London and now in East Sussex - in the chillingly appropriate village of Cross in Hand, where the crusaders mustered. People in places like this know too much of George up the road, who used to be a journalist and a businessman of some kind and now fancies himself as a priest.

Far better, surely, for me to address the congregation of St Bride's, the journalists' church, where my sacramental insights might be appreciated, or to travel to Scotland, as I did recently, to "prophesy" at a wedding of friends and to preach in an Episcopalian church.

Happily for all of us, I've had cause to recognize the arrogance of this attitude in the light of some recent experience - and, indeed, in light of some scriptural passages that have led me to revise my opinion of the nature of prophetic practice away from home. One of those passages comes from the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews. Probably written before AD 70 - within touching distance of witnesses of the risen Christ - this letter encourages steadfastness, perseverance and watchfulness for those observing the new covenant and the nascent Christian faith: Be careful to be kind to strangers, instructs the writer, because that way people have entertained angels unawares.

So much for scripture. Now the experience. Recently I took my elder sons, Tom and Fred, who are 19 and 17, to New York for their first trip to the States. I'm an old NYC hand from my journalism days and I told Fred, particularly, to be careful with his possessions, to keep his valuables in his belt bag zipped up, to be alert because this could still be a dangerous City. To watch me and learn from my vast experience.

We took a cab, with a typically truculent New-Yorker driver of some sort of middle-eastern origin, from JFK in to our hotel in mid-town Manhattan, where we jumped out, paid off the cabbie and went in to check-in. At this point, Fred announced he'd left his bag on the back seat of the cab. There was a horrible inevitability to this and it flashed through my mind that I'd have a job explaining to his Mum how I took my eye off the ball so early in the trip. The concierge meanwhile was asking for our passports. I looked down for my bag and realized that I'd left it on the back seat too. With our passports in it. This old New York hand, showing his sons how it's done, headed dolefully for the security desk and the prospect of long phone calls to the British consulate.

The story could end there, an object lesson in my hubris and pride, a little Greek tragedy, in which the fates conspired to bring the proud protagonist low. But there's more. In my room, I knew we'd seen the last of the bags - I know enough of New York cabbies to know that they are poorly paid and back-seat booty is part of their weekly haul. And British passports are highly marketable. An alternative view was just as bleak; Fred had a mobile phone and an MP3 player in his bag - who was going to turn in three passports and invite questions about where Fred's technology had gone? No, it was all gone, for sure. The sacramental me offered up a prayer of penitence for my lack of faith, while the secular me faced the truth.

An hour later the front desk called my room. There was a man from transportation in the lobby with some possessions of mine. I ran downstairs, barely touching them. There was a man nervously waiting by the door with three passports in his hand: "Are you from the cab company?" I asked. "I am the cab" he replied. I'd only seen the back of his head and hadn't looked at him properly when I paid him off. At least he had the passports. But then he led me to the car - there were the bags too. He hadn't even opened Fred's. He only had the passports out in his hand because he'd discovered the bags about three fares later and needed to know who they belonged to.

I called him to run us out to JFK a week later and paid him double the fare, but in truth it wasn't the money that had motivated him to cross Manhattan to return our possessions. He had two sons himself, he said, and he knew what it was like. His name's Haddi and he's from Ethiopia. I knew two things about Ethiopia before I met him - it's very, very poor and it was a very, very early country to convert to Christianity in the fourth century. I know a third thing from this Ethiopian now: Be careful with strangers; people have entertained angels unawares. I might add, but with a different understanding now, that no man can be a prophet in his own land.

What is the nature of that changed understanding? What is it about the way we treat strangers that informs Christian prophecy - if prophecy means interpreting the will of God? For me, it's a switch from a prophetic tradition among strangers of telling to one of listening - switching from transmit to receive.

I went to Scotland - a foreigner as it were - to preach at the wedding of old colleagues and continuing friends. I spoke about passion, about self-sacrificial love. At the celebrations afterwards, I tried to follow the rubric of Luke's gospel, sat down-table and waited to be moved up. That didn't happen, of course, but I was more than happy where I was. I'm no angel , but they entertained me unawares nonetheless. I met a young woman who works for a sort of swat team in disaster zones in developing economies, which was clearly a way of living her witness to the gospel. She has worked in places like Pakistan and Sudan. And Ethiopia.

I had come to preach, to prophesy, to transmit. And I received, listened, learned. I have tried to discern wider lessons for Christian mission from this altered state of prophecy. At the macrocosmic, national and political level, I would venture to suggest that it's the greatest folly to believe that Christian culture and secular democracy can be delivered at the barrel of a foreigner's gun. To be truly prophetic, we as western nations should be taking the risk of putting ourselves among strangers and looking for angels.

At our everyday, personal level, I suggest the same applies. No one can be a prophet in their own home. So we should be taking the risk of putting ourselves among strangers, listening and learning from them, for they may be angels. That is to say, we may see God in them. To prophesy, to interpret the will of God, is to look for the divine in strangers, not to proselytize at them. We may be called to make disciples of strangers. But a good place to start is to be disciples with strangers. That's a risk with strangers that we can all take in life.

My youngest son, Charlie, who didn't come to New York, is 12 and was starting his new school when I returned from Scotland. I knew he was anxious. He doesn't like change or new places. I thought of telling him some version of "No one can be a prophet in his own home". To encourage him into this strange land, I thought of what to tell him about presenting himself. Just be yourself, perhaps, do your best, say you want to be friends. But I've learned enough lately to know it's not about what he transmits about himself that matters, it's what he allows himself to receive of others. So, on that first morning at his new school, I told him to look out for angels.

Posted by George Pitcher on October 29, 2007 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This article first appeared in Roar, the magazine of Lion Trust

Margaret Thatcher famously co-opted the teachings of Jesus Christ for her monetary policy. "No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions," she said. "He had to have money as well." Much the same might be said of the Church of England. Only extreme disciples of Richard Dawkins would claim that the Church's intentions are anything other than good. But it needs money to implement those intentions.

Sadly, the recent experience of the Church has resembled less that of the Good Samaritan and has looked rather more like the victim to whom he tends in the parable - mugged and left for dead. The casual secular observer will have noticed the litany of stories about financial crises in our "established" Church. Clergy stipends can't keep up with even modest levels of inflation and, when they retire, it looks as though the Church they have served over the years for modest incomes won't be able to meet even basic pension expectations.

Specific stories support the perception of an ecclesiastical mess of investment policies. The middle-classes prosper from the resale value of the ubiquitous "Old Rectory", while the Church missed out of the residential property booms of the 80s and 90s - indeed, estate agency Knight Frank claimed recently that former vicarages and rectories are cited as the ideal home by 80 per cent of country buyers, while the Church sold them between the booms.

Meanwhile, the C of E is vilified for being invested in Caterpillar, the bulldozer manufacturer whose vehicles are said to have leveled Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip. And little examples of financial ineptitude pop up closer to home - some old bibles and manuscripts from the Diocese of Truro, which the Church sold only last year for £36,000, were recently sold on by antiquarian booksellers for upwards of £500,000.

All in all, the popular image of the luckless Church Commissioner is one of a bumbling cleric, whose pockets are as likely to contain broken biscuits as a working calculator. The truth - as ever with the truth - is somewhat different to expectations. During their short history the Commissioners have accommodated some of the sharpest asset-management minds around. But like all popular misconceptions there is a seed of truth in the image of incompetence - Church finances have been brought low by a toxic mixture of hubris, ill luck and management structures as arcane as church architecture.

The Church Commissioners were formed in 1948 - on 1st April, interestingly enough - by the merger of the Victorian and dusty Ecclesiastical Commissioners and Queen Anne's Bounty, which had been founded in 1704 to manage the assets confiscated over two centuries before by Henry VIII, the purpose being to sustain poor clergy. The Commissioners' starting bank balance was £1,146,946. Its early guiding lights set out to maximise income and this could only mean a switch from the guaranteed but relatively modest returns of gilt-edged bonds to equities. By the early 50s, the Church was invested in a startling variety of ordinary shares in industries from food and engineering to textiles and tobacco; in 1954, gross income from the General Fund had risen to £8.5m, a rise of £1.5m in six years.

The Commissioners called it "an embarrassment of riches" and their blushes weren't spared by the press - by 1961, the Daily Mail referred to "this miracle [which] has been brought about entirely by wise investment" and the Daily Herald a year later was putting Canterbury in the same category as property speculators Clore and Cotton, which apparently made Archbishop Michael Ramsay squirm (his embarrassment was compounded when, soon afterwards, the soft-porn magazine Parade quite wrongly accused the Church of being invested in street-loads of provincial brothels).

Whatever the Primate's discomfort, the Church was now a powerful player in the property markets and was reaping the dividends to do all materially that it needed to do. But, like the parable of the rich man who hoarded his harvest, the Church could not know what the future held. The first sign that years of plenty were ending came with the hikes in inflation in the 70s - in the year to April 1975, the retail prices index showed that the cost of living had risen by 21.7 per cent. Clergy stipends, modest as they were, started to become an issue - more accurately for the Church, it was "the cost of livings". But even as inflation raised the cost base, equities were still lining the coffers. In the financial year 1975-76, the Commissioners' portfolio rocketed from £58.4m to £246.6m, mostly on the back of equities. The Church began to diversify controversially abroad, into the United States in the early 80s and even became obliquely exposed, through its banking, to apartheid-riven South Africa.

Even as the almost biblical signs of impending doom darkened the sky - the prospect of women's ordination, for instance, threw up an estimated cost of £11m for male clergy who would quit in protest - an air of hubris among the Commissioners was maintained. After the stock market crash of 1987, one official wrote: "So far we have agreed to sell 154 flats for £23m - so much for Black Monday!" * The Commissioners' crash, when it came like an Old Testament judgment, was brutal. And, if there is a single most important lesson to be learned, it is not to allow policy-making functions to be separate from asset-management, as they were at the Commissioners.

With asset values plummeting and over-stretched on interest rates for its development borrowings, taken on to fund those US projects just before the crash, the Church began a fire-sale. In the second half of the 80s, its total assets had risen in value from under £2bn to over £3bn - by 1992, they were back to £2bn. The press, which had lauded the Commissioners' investment "miracle", now laid into their collapse. The Financial Times asked: "How did this august body, which ranks a number of distinguished City figures on its assets committee, get into such a mess?"

The Grim Reaper's scythe swung - among bishops' palaces and their fleets of cars, among the plethora of Victorian churches in urban areas and among those rambling old rectories across the country, whose drives would soon rumble to the sound of 4X4s and delivery vans. No one now recalls how wise the Commissioners were to make so much money, only how foolish they were to squander it.

But, in the Christian faith as elsewhere, there is always hope. It may be that what has emerged from the old Christendom model, in which the Church of England was a great post-empire organ of state, is something more authentic and of greater humility, more in touch with the realities of corporate life, increasingly staffed by clergy with secular jobs and more in touch with the Reformational principles that gave it birth. Let's hope so.

The Rev'd George Pitcher is Curate at St Bride's, Fleet Street, London.
*Quoted in the very best book on this subject: The Church of England in the Twentieth Century: The Church Commissioners and the Politics of Reform, 1948-1998, published by Boydell.

Posted by George Pitcher on October 26, 2007 4:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a transcript of a sermon delivered by George Pitcher at St Bride's on 7th October 2007

I'd like to talk this morning about the 7th-century BC prophet Habbakuk, from who we heard in our Old Testament reading, and connect him with a story currently running in The Archers, the radio series which the BBC has been airing, it seems, since about the same time as Habbakuk. This may sound like one of those bets that professional people make among themselves to brighten up otherwise boring material: "I bet you can't get Habbakuk and The Archers into the same 12-minute sermon". Well, here goes.

The Omnibus edition of The Archers is running about now, but those of you who follow it during the week may know that the long-suffering Jennifer Aldridge has just had to talk to her philandering husband Brian about his attitude to his son Adam. Adam is gay and lives in the village with his partner Ian (interestingly the BBC recently had them celebrating their "marriage", something we in the Church are not yet allowed to call same-sex civil partnerships). Brian has brought home his infant love-child, Rhuari, after his former mistress died of cancer and Adam and Ian have offered to look after him while Brian and Jenny go away for a break. Brian doesn't like the idea: "It's an instinctive reaction," he says. "It doesn't feel right. Two men, living as partners." Jenny corrects him: "Two people - who love each other very much." She goes on: "Promise me you'll stop seeing this as confusing. Love is love, Brian, and that child needs all the love he can get." Hold that thought: Love is love. An obvious truism, but that's because it's True.

Now back to Habbakuk. He's the eighth of the minor prophets. It's a short book, only three chapters long, and deals with the prophet's complaint about the oppression and lawlessness in Judah, which he predicts will lead to God's punishment through an invasion by the Chaldeans (he proves to be correct on the invasion bit). It's a seemingly innocuous passage, but it contains one of the most important phrases written in the Bible for the formation of our Protestant faith: In verse 4 of chapter 2, Habbakuk describes how the innocent will be sustained even as they are involved in the sufferings of the guilty: "Behold, his soul which is lifted up is not upright in him: but the just shall live by his faith". Now hold that scripture: The just shall live by his faith.

This is an important phrase because it's picked up in Pauline theology throughout the New Testament - in the letter to the Romans 1:17 (" Therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith") and to the Galatians in 3.11 ("No man is justified by the law in the sight of God, it is evident: for the just shall live by faith") and by the author of Hebrews in 10:38 ("Now the just shall live by faith: but if any man draw back, my souls shall have no pleasure in him."). And the Evangelicals say we don't do Bible study, eh? In the way of the Lectionary, none of these passages followed our Habbakuk reading this morning, but the same implication is there in the passage from the Letter to Timothy that we heard (1:13): "Hold fast the form of sound words, which thou has heard of me, in faith and love which is Christ Jesus."

This is important because Habbakuk with that one simple phrase lays the foundations through the epistles for the principles for which our Reformation was fought, at the core of which is Martin Luther's doctrine of "justification by faith alone" - meaning that we are made right with God not through what we say or do, through our earthly acts and laws, not by some mediation on our behalf by the Church or pious people, but solely through our faith in Christ alone. The predominant view during the Reformation was that St Paul, when he was writing to the church in Galatia and to others and was picking up on Habbakuk's "the just shall live by his faith", was saying that Judaism was a faith of "works" - that Jews believed that you were judged by what good works you did in your life - a system that had now been overturned by the new covenant of Christ, in which we were justified with God solely through our faith in Christ; an act of God's "grace" rather than an act of our "works". In fact, more recent scholarship called the New Perspectives on Paul suggests that Paul wasn't saying that Judaism was a faith of works at all - he was saying it was a faith of grace, but that the Jews' pre-occupation with dietary laws and cultural laws of circumcision and the like was getting in the way of faith. Some scholars are going further today and suggesting that Paul was questioning whether laws and legalistic structures are an effective framework through which to recognize God at all.

This fantastically rich heritage - that God cannot be understood or illumined or contained by our petty rules and laws on earth, but only through our faith - is what makes Anglicanism so special, so exciting and so attractive, at least to me. Because the implications are enormous - of course God cares if we sin, if sin is to be defined as something that separates us from God. But it's not by behaving well and obeying rules that we're in God's favour - it is only by having faith. It makes so much more sense of the Christian story - everything can be a terrible mess, but if we just hang in there, if we just hold the faith, then we will live by that faith.

It's a theology that has made the Church of England so attractive. To borrow New Labour language, it's a Big Tent - actually a tent with no walls and with more than enough room for everyone, with no entry requirement beyond faith. No rules, just faith. A limitless shelter in which all are welcome, whoever they are, regardless of race or colour or gender or disability or sexuality or, yes, regardless of creed. A Big Tent of enquiry and exploration and questioning and debate and dialectic on the exciting journey of faith towards understanding the mind of God. This was the triumph of the Reformation, replacing and extending the authoritarian, catechistic and, at that time, corrupt Church of Rome.

Tragically, that Reformational heritage is under threat today from those who would seek to draw up rules for what it means to be Christian, sort of minimum entry requirements, a checklist of beliefs. There is a draft Covenant before Synod, to which we may be asked to subscribe if we are to call ourselves members of this Church. This agenda is driven by the Reform movement, as it's called. I think it is profoundly dangerous because it threatens all we hold dear in the principles of "justification by faith alone" and is dictated to us by people who claim a better grasp than us of the mind of God. People who tell us in the supposedly pluralistic and inclusive Big Tent that, in a chilling echo of the Augustinian principle that "error has no right", we have no place in the Big Tent.

There have always been people with these views down the ages and the tent has proved big enough to accommodate us all. But now the tent is being torn apart. And the weapon of choice is the Bible - the very same Bible that contains Habbakuk and the Pauline professions of justification by faith alone is turned into a rulebook. But the Bible is not a set of rules, it's a dialogue, a constant engagement with the changing world in which we live. To reduce it to a narrow prescription for human behaviour - human "works" if you like - is to abuse it, as it has been abused already down the ages. As John Shelby Spong, former bishop of Newark in the US, recently wrote to Archbishop Rowan Williams: The Bible was quoted to support the Divine Right of Kings in 1215, to oppose Galileo in the 17th century, to oppose Darwin in the 19th century, to support slavery and apartheid in the 19th and 20th centuries, to keep women from being educated, voting and being ordained and consecrated in the 20th and 21st century. Today it is quoted to continue the oppression and rejection of homosexual people.

These people are entitled to their views. What they are not entitled to do is to tear down the Big Tent that is Anglicanism, with its mass of reasonable and tolerant and thoughtful and compassionate people, and turn it into a club, the entry of which is to be prescribed by rules of their own making. I respectfully suggest that that is the principle that the Archbishop of Canterbury should be upholding - that all are welcome in the universal tent that is Anglicanism - rather than the pursuit of unity at all costs to that truth, a truth which can only be compromised in so doing.

So back to Ambridge and The Archers. Brian cannot accept his neighbours, one of whom is his own son. It doesn't "feel right", he says. But his wife Jenny knows instinctively, though she doesn't ascribe it to any faith of hers, what Anglicans have held down the generations. The one simple and uncompromisable quality of two people who love each other very much. There can be no qualification, no further justification needed beyond her faith in that principle when she tells him: "Love is love, Brian." Amen to that.

Posted by George Pitcher on October 8, 2007 5:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)