MARCUS THROUP is the centre director for the outstanding St Mellitus College, which trains people for the ministry. He has had vast experience as a missionary in Brazil and as a vocations director for Winchester diocese. In his new book, Perfectly Ordinary, he brings warmth, deep concern, insight, and vision to what the clergy ought to be like.
He makes it clear that he has written this book out of the context of the egregious safeguarding failures of the Church and the demoralising successive failures of its leadership over bullying, abuse, collusive failure to report, and cover-up. Throup’s descriptive subtitle is In search of healthy church leadership.
The book will have gone to press long before the dramatic news of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s resignation and of many people thinking that other significant church leaders should resign, too. Its focus is almost exclusively on the leadership of the ordinary parish clergy: the quality of these people, their enabling integrity, their humility, their spiritual depth, their sacrificial, hard work in serving the community, and, above all, their love of Jesus Christ and the people of God.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part deals with spiritual abuse in leadership. These church leaders use religion to control, dominate, and abuse people. Throup calls them out as showmen/women and spectacular leaders. Spiritual abuse could come from leaders who are overprotective, egocentric, or narcissistic. Whatever personality quirk there might be, though, Abuse is Abuse. His analysis of spiritual abuse is excellent. But it would have been more helpful to look at it in the wider context of other abuses and the general effect of power in the caring professions. (See Richard Hugman’s work.)
The second part deals with his vision of healthy, unspectacular, and creative parish leadership. Throup calls it reclaiming the ordinary. “Healthy organisations are characterised by cultures of mutual respect and mutual accountability.” His call is to unglamorous leadership that is responsive to the needs, joys, pains, and struggles of the community. His call is for parish leaders to be Christ-like through the exercise of day-to-day prayerfulness, regular reflection on authority, status, and power, and responding with wisdom and humility to all.
Throup has written his vision in solid 21st-century words, but it is fundamentally the spiritual vision of the great Anglican leaders from the 17th century until now. That is: that the strength of the Church of England is in its caring parishes and their clergy, not in its hierarchy — especially relevant now, when our hierarchy has lost its way in a cul-de-sac of failed management techniques.
The third part deals with how the author’s vision of ordinary leadership can be made viable. As you would expect from the head of a theological college, Throup gives good practical advice: how clergy should care for their own well-being, how they should create spaces of grace for themselves and others, and how to learn to let go in love. Although he mentions the importance of oversight, he does not show how that accountability could work.
I have implied that this book would be of interest principally for those in or training for the ministry. But that is not right. The questions at the end of each chapter are brilliant. PCCs or other parish groups could use the questions to discover what kind of leadership they want and need. Mutual learning and mutual support would create and sustain the perfectly ordinary outstanding leader.
The Ven. Dr Lyle Dennen is Archdeacon Emeritus of Hackney, in east London.
Perfectly Ordinary: In search of healthy church leadership
Marcus Throup
Canterbury Press £14.99
(978-1-78622-585-6)
Church Times Bookshop £11.99