All Things to All People

I couldn’t help but cringe along this morning as I read an article by Giles Fraser on the search for a replacement for Justin Welby as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the head of the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion. The piece is ominously titled “Anglicanism’s Poisoned Chalice.” According to Fraser, it’s a job that nobody with any sense would want.

The problem in finding a suitable person is this: it has become an impossible job. Not just difficult, but impossible. After all, the Archbishop has to be in more than one place at the same time — as both head of the Church of England and head of the worldwide Anglican Communion — and also because it necessitates the ability to say totally opposite things to the very different and warring tribes of the church. It is a job where much is expected, but with very little power to achieve it. The Church of England is mired in layers of deadening bureaucracy. Many clergy feel unloved and overworked. Morale is low…

Which is why no one wants the job. To be the Archbishop of Canterbury is to put yourself into the meat grinder. You are asked to speak Christian truths to a nation that largely couldn’t care less what you say, unless you say something silly or too political. Then the press will chew you up. You are asked to take royal funerals and make speeches in the House of Lords, yet also to have the common touch, appealing to everyone. “All things to all people,” as Saint Paul described it.

No wonder anyone with the slightest shred of self-preservation would run a mile from the job—leaving only a bunch of deeply unexciting candidates.

Take away that bit about royal funerals and speeches in the House of Lords and Fraser could be describing the role of pretty much any Christian (or residually Christian) outpost in the post-Christian West. Deadening bureaucracy. Low clergy morale. A largely apathetic cultural context that often sees pastors and priests as irrelevant (at best). And, of course, those “warring tribes” inside and outside the church. In the Anglican context, one of the central tensions is the gap between the mostly progressive context of the UK and the mostly conservative context of vast swaths of the rest of the Anglican communion worldwide. This dynamic is repeated in many denominations including the one in which I serve. To lead well and with anything resembling integrity in the context of wildly different assumptions and expectations from the warring tribes is a challenge to put it mildly.

The temptation to try to be “all things to all people” is strong, particularly in a context where churches are shrinking. You want to keep the customers happy, after all. And pastoral ministry probably tends to draw disproportionately from the ranks of the people pleasers anyway. It can be really easy to just become a chameleon, saying the things that you know will win you praise (or at least the absence of scorn) in wildly different contexts. Conflict is messy and hard and exhausting. It can seem utterly futile—everyone just hears what they want to hear and vanishingly few interpret with anything resembling Christian charity. The warring factions have too much at stake.

I spent some time reading 1 Corinthians this morning, particularly the section where Paul uses the “all things to all people” phrase. It’s fairly clear that Paul was not motivated by a need to be liked. Some people in the early church seemed to be unimpressed with him (to put it mildly) and he felt quite free to “call out” (to use an utterly exhausted and exhausting locution) behaviours and beliefs that he believed to be contrary to the gospel. Indeed, for Paul it was all about the gospel:

I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.

This is the hope for all leaders in the church, from the rarefied air of the Archbishop of Canterbury right down to the humble country pastor. That the gospel would remain central. That the main thing would continue to be the main thing. That the church would resolutely point to the One who came not to call righteous (and the warring factions are nothing if not righteous!) but sinners, the One who came to bring healing and salvation not to the healthy but to the sick.

Leading religious communities will never not be at least somewhat political. It would be naïve to pretend otherwise. The warring factions will continue to war. No Christian leader will ever preside over (or alongside) wonderfully uniform churches where everyone thinks precisely the same thing about every issue, and where everyone assumes the best in those whose views they do not share. The church will remain what it has always been: a messy community full of broken human sinners who are in desperate need of grace, who need to be trained in love, who need to be directed in worship to the risen Christ who forgives sinners and offers the hope of newness.

I hope the next Archbishop of Canterbury will major on this and not on the soul-crushing bureaucracy or on futilely attempting to appease the factions or on demonstrating “relevance” to a deeply unhealthy post-Christian culture. I hope the same for every leader of every kingdom outpost in the post-Christian West (and beyond).