“It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with the management alone.”

With these words from Frederick Winslow Taylor, the so-called science of management consultancy came into being. And an era of misery began for those on the receiving end. In time, the language softened, the management gurus discovered technology and a smarter bedside manner, but the principles remained roughly the same.

Perhaps it is my inner Marxist struggling to get out – Gramsci said Taylorism inevitably gave rise to thoughts of revolution – but I was reminded of Taylor’s guiding principles as I looked through the recent directive from head office, outlining the new thinking on the organisational structures of the Church of England. The report is a series of impenetrable soul-sapping flow charts and space-ship style infographics that make those graphic medieval explanations of the trinity look like child’s play. It’s a powerpoint friendly “Vision of the Church of England in the 2020’s”. It seems the bishops have had the management consultants in. And the result is thoroughly depressing.

Taylor was born in 1856, outside Philadelphia, in a strict Quaker family his mother an ardent abolitionist. His great work ‘The Principles of Scientific Management’ was published in 1911, and it became the founding text of what became a burgeoning industry in the twentieth century. The big idea was that, armed with a more systematic approach to labour — basically a stop-watch and a clip board — the management class was able to extract greater productivity from those actually doing the job, towards whom he felt nothing but scorn.

“One of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character.”

Given that it was founded on such ideas, it is unsurprising that workers learned to rue the day when the slick and smiley management consultants turned up at the factory door, promising greater efficiency through organisational restructuring. Much of it, of course, was an elaborate con. As one former management consultant confessed in The Atlantic some years ago: “We kind of liked failing businesses: there was usually plenty of money to be made in propping them up before they finally went under…”

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The church’s new thinking is summed up as “Simpler, Humbler, Bolder”. That sounds fine — but look a little deeper and you begin to understand that it is a euphemism for a programme of cost-cutting, parish shrinking and the invention of new (cheaper) forms of church — “a mixed economy” — outside the parish structure.

“The Church of England has written its own Treaty of Versailles, and it now going to spend a decade looking for someone to surrender to,” as Fr Marcus Walker has pointedly described it. Or as another wrote: “Come Holy Spirit, synergise those key deliverables.”

Now, I am not saying someone is making money from all of this. But I am saying that planning for failure is encouraging it. The re-engineering plan is the administration of decline dressed up as humility: run by managers, fed by slogans, designed for consumers. The language they — I suppose I should say we — increasingly now use is a curious merger of the scriptural with a kind of technocratic systems think.

Relationships with head office are increasingly mediated through electronic forms not conversations. The church says it wants to resist centralisation, and yet the centre keeps on growing, constantly bloated by the felt need to write new reports that nobody reads, develop high sounding initiatives parishes don’t want and are written in an uninspiring insider language that lacks any sort of gospel poetry.

But the people in the pews simply do not understand it. Words that one still remembers as having an inspirational purpose have been requisitioned for leaden management-ese. Under this new semantic inflection, the gospel no longer sounds like the source of life and hope. It has become a core competence.

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Why not join us for “digital lab webinars”? the new churchofengland.org asks. All of this is distracting chaff, for the heart and soul of the Church of England is in its parishes. “This is why the asset stripping of our parishes over the last 30 years is so serious and concerning,” as the Archdeacon of London, Fr Luke Millar, wrote in response to this new plan yesterday. He continued: “the sense that we have at the moment that the ‘parish is bad’ and anything else is good, that inherited church is inherently un-missional, that the parochial patrimony should be swiftly swept away, is a generational mistake which we must avoid.”

In 2005, the high priests of management consultancy, McKinsey and Co admitted that “Change management as it is traditionally applied is outdated. We know, for example, that 70 percent of change programs fail to achieve their goals, largely due to employee resistance and lack of management support.” I do not mind that the church is behind the times. But I wish it was behind the times by centuries not by 30 years. And employee (clergy) resistance to this new look Church of England feels, to me at least, utterly overwhelming.

I firmly believe that the parish church has a lot more yet to give. It remains the jewel in the crown of the Church of England. But it must be properly resourced – and that means the centre has to give up much more of its wealth and power and return it to the local church. Abolish General Synod maybe. Cut the number of Diocesan posts, yes even the number of bishops.

But if the Church of England is indeed going to die, I wish it would prepare to do so with a bit more Christian dignity. We are a death and resurrection body of people, and we must trust more in that inspiring pattern of life than the cheap consolation of those who pretend we can be great again — if only we radically re-organised around the idea that we are some sort of pop-up business with God as our product.

When challenged about organised religion, I often quip that we in the Church of England generally go in for disorganised religion. And I kind of like it that way. The charismatic power of the divine cannot be neatly corralled into the channels of any one institution. But that doesn’t stop some from trying.

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Of course, it may be that, like watching sausages being made, the formulation of policy is always more off-putting than what ends up on the plate. But out in the parishes, many of us are longing for inspiration, for a renewal of the energy and enthusiasm that first inspired us to work here. Instead, we are being drip fed indirect messages that the work we are doing is the ailing arm of mother church, a draining cost centre that has lost its way.

It is our vocation as a church to keep the flame of faith alive in these most secular of times. But we do not sustain God, God sustains us. He doesn’t need our help to survive, He simply asks for our faithfulness. And there can be a kind of martyrdom in that, as zoomed-out exhausted clergy remain committed to their place and their calling, and as the lonely prayer “thy kingdom come” rises from now Covid-emptied churches.

It’s more and better priests that we need, saying their prayers, serving their people. More clean-cut spreadsheet-savvy vicars who can parrot this new gospel of secular management speak? Not so much.

As I emerged from the great west door of the Cathedral, sweaty and itchy in my bizarre new dressing-up outfit, the local Roman Catholic parish priest, an elderly gentleman of many years in Holy Orders, knelt down before me and asked for my blessing.

I had no idea what I was supposed to do and so rather mumbled my first words of blessing, rapidly invented: “May Jesus bless you Father, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” He stood up and smiled. I wasn’t sure what I had just done. What was this thing that had just been done to me? I felt like a total fraud. Who was I to pronounce such words?

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As the years went by, this sense of being an imposter has never entirely left me. But also, nothing has defined me more than this service, nothing has come anywhere close to shaping my sense of direction or purpose.

You might think that by the time the Bishop came to place his hands upon my head, I should have been much clearer about what it was that I was being called to be. True, theological college had prepared me a little for some of the varied competences that are required of a priest: the ability to preach a half decent sermon, conversance with the liturgy, an aptitude for pastoral care etc.

They hadn’t, though, explained that I would spend a lot of my time as a building’s manager and finance officer. But being a priest can never be reduced to a set of competences. Indeed, the very heart of the job – job being entirely the wrong word – is something that it is not possible to be good at.

So, to put it bluntly: I am an incompetent priest. And I suspect that this is the only way it is possible to be one. ‘In Praise of Incompetence’ was the title of a brilliant lecture on ministry by the Baptist theologian, Ruth Gouldbourne. And she was spot on.

This needs some explaining. And there is no way of explaining it without talking about God – that embarrassing mood-changing subject that feels a bit like over-sharing and makes the grown-ups fall silent. Because the core to any priestly identity is that one is being asked to stand in a doorway between God and humanity – which is a ludicrous idea to those who suspect that the door opens out onto nothing but empty space.

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Priesthood is not the only doorway. I emphasise “a” doorway: because there are many other points of contact, and the old idea that the clergy stand as the sole gatekeepers to the divine, controlling access, has long been a way that religion has secured and manipulated temporal power. That was why we needed a Reformation and the revolutionary idea of the priesthood of all believers.

But, nonetheless, whenever I stand behind the altar before bread and wine, I am acutely aware that an inordinate number of impossible expectations flow through my actions. And that the possibility of God faces back at people through my pathetic efforts. “But play you must a tune beyond us, yet ourselves”, as the poet Wallace Stevens put it, not thinking about priesthood. But he couldn’t have summed it up any better.

That’s why I describe the priesthood as a job for the incompetent: to emphasise the impossibility of standing in this liminal space between God and humanity. And the barefaced cheek of doing so can only be justified by a sense that God might be employing a useless, fickle, lazy, selfish, arrogant person like me – like you – to convey something of His presence. In other words, the job can’t be done and the only way to do it is to fail at it.

Indeed, if you don’t think you are rubbish at this job, then you haven’t properly understood it. Because those who are apparently ‘good at it’ might easily be tempted to think they are good priests through their own ability. And that is the far deeper failure. Give me the terrible preacher, the badly organised, bad tempered and pastorally inept priest anyday, if s/he also models a human incapacity that can also be recognised as a broken sacrament of something other than themselves. God save us from popular ‘successful’ clergy with full churches and a winning manner.

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To put all this in less fancy terms: to be a rubbish priest is to know that you live by confession and forgiveness. Every day, precisely because of the impossible place in which people like me have been called to stand, we are obliged permanently to live by the rhythm of sorry and thank you. Sorry, because I have been rubbish once again. And thank you, because I have been assured of the grace of forgiveness, the resources to carry on. No functionalist definition of priesthood, can possibly begin to describe this extraordinary pattern of life. It represents what the inspirational priest James Allison once called “The joy of being wrong”.

None of which is absolutely unique to being a priest – it is just that the impossible job we are called to do radically dramatises human incapacity and failure. I have a poem permanently pinned to my study wall. It is not written by a priest or even by a Christian. But it has served for me as a kind of spiritual justification for the life that priests are called to undertake. It is by the genius Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood

Priesthood is a ruined house that contains a whisper of God’s peace. And for 25 years it has been the guiding principle of my life.