The failure of Anglican managerialism | Gerry Lynch | The Critic Magazine:

High Modernism in its post-War heyday was marked by strong confidence in scientific, technological, and moral progress; deference to expertise and technique — or the verisimilitude of them; faith that humanity could master nature — including human nature; and a disregard for local variation, and inherited organically-developed concepts and structures.

[…]But we don’t live in 1963 anymore. The decline of faith in modernism started even before the sixties ended. At first so slow as to barely be visible, we all now appreciate there is a crisis of faith in leaders, institutions, and dominant ideologies across the West. Yet nothing has come on the scene to replace modernism; modernism was corroded by its own contradictions and attacked by post-modernism, but PoMo could build nothing in modernism’s place.

This, I think, explains the modern political fault-line of “populists” versus “progressives” and technocrats. The progressives and technocrats still believe in the old faith of High Modernism; the populists opportunistically penetrate its crumbling walls, like migrating peoples into the late Roman Empire, without themselves being able to generate any new organising principle for society.

Gerry Lynch, writing in The Critic, points out the failures of trying to fix Church by applying organizational management tools. It’s a category error. The problem isn’t that we are poorly organized (though we are), the problem is that the answers and ideas we share are not able to be understood by the people of this day. (For example, we sing hymns that were wildly popular in the 19th Century but are essentially a cipher to people who listen to modern commercial music today.)

Lynch ends the article above (do go read the whole thing) by pointing out that we do have something to say to our present circumstance in a moment when Modernity is failing and nothing else is at hand to replace it. We (the Church) has lived through times like this before. Lynch reminds us that we’d do well to remember how we spoke words of Hope and consolation back then.