Why Paula Vennells should have been a bishop
If only the Bishop of London had swapped jobs with her, writes George Pitcher
It’s often offered as a piece of advice to those who have found a faith and are trying to discern where their ministry may lie: “The need is not the call.”
It means that an opportunity to serve isn’t necessarily vocational. In other words, every job that is thrown in one’s way isn’t a divine nudge to take it. It’s obvious when we think about it – if it were so, everyone in ministry would be dashing from one job to the next and never getting anything done (which admittedly may often feel the case in parish ministry).
That’s why discernment processes in the Church are invariably protracted. Are you sure this is vocational, or is it simply a job you can see yourself in? Sadly, those processes all too often fail and people end up in the wrong jobs, by which I mean roles for which they are ill-equipped.
When this happens to us, we may well look enviously at someone in a job for which we’re better suited. Not just better suited for us, but better suited than the person that’s doing it. And very often we’ll be right. What we need is a job swap.
Hugely vilified
I have one such job swap in mind. Take Paula Vennells, the hugely vilified former CEO of the Post Office, who presided over the catastrophic prosecutions of innocent sub-postmasters, with such irredeemable consequences.
Her errors of judgments and/or negligences in corporate office have been widely identified. As has the fact that she is ordained as a priest in the Church of England. In that latter context, she was interviewed in 2017 for the post of Bishop of London.
I have to wonder whether she would have made a better bishop than head of a major corporation. Such a career move may not have averted the PO’s crisis – the see of London didn’t become vacant until Fujitsu’s faulty software, Horizon, had caused its havoc on Vennells’ watch. But had she prioritised her ordained ministry, then the PO’s need may not have been her call in the first place, to coin the vocational advice.
Blind managerialism
Vennells is often accused of a managerialism that was blind to the suffering of her staff in the field. That may be so, but it’s also the case that the Church could perhaps do better with bishops being somewhat more managerial, if that might be defined as tight control, scrutiny, strategic planning and accountability for results.
One might add that there has been some real fraud in the Diocese of London, rather than that imagined at the Post Office, with head of operations Martin Sargeant convicted of embezzling £5.2 million of Church funds in 2022. Vennells might have been better at chasing down that real criminal.
If Vennells had been Bishop of London, it follows that the current incumbent of that post would not be. Let’s just see if the job swap works. Step forward Sarah Mullally, Bishop of London, by all reports a competent, good and kind person. But was she the right choice over Vennells as Bishop of London?
Parrot chaotic Government responses
Mullally presided over a significant chunk of the Church of England’s policy during the coronavirus lockdowns as chair of its Covid Recovery Group. It’s difficult to see that she did much more than parrot what we now know were chaotic Government responses to the pandemic. The consequence, tragically, were churches locked up as the country was locked down, just when they were needed most.
Might Vennells have acted differently and more defensively of our churches as Bishop? We can’t know. But what we can guess is that Mullally’s instinct might have been to act more compassionately towards postmasters had she been Post Office boss.
A people person
Her former career is as a nurse and it’s said she gave up training to be a doctor so that she could take a more holistic approach to patients. It sounds like she’s a people person. The PO could have done with that, someone empathetic who might not have tolerated the bullying of its ludicrous henchman Stephen Bradshaw, described as a “mafia gangster” by harassed sub-postmasters.
Vennells, incidentally, had a very brief stint as the chair of an NHS Trust after the Post Office, a role for which Mullally might also have been better equipped.
Ultimately, I concede that this is a fairly pointless exercise in “what if”. Vennells was CEO of the PO and Mullally was made Bishop of London. End of.
But all this came to mind as I listened to the lessons at church last Sunday. The Old Testament reading was the calling of Samuel, who three times mistakes God calling him in the night for his teacher Eli. Meanwhile, the gospel reading had Philip approaching Nathaniel to follow the Messiah. Nathaniel sneers: “Did anything good ever come out of Nazareth?”
Too often we respond to human calls and instinct rather than the divine, to the job we think we want, rather than the one for which we’re designed. And our need is not the call.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest
The real shame is that Paula didn't see how much shame she would bring to the church. She has to bear that now till she dies.
George, in your otherwise splendid polemic against the church (if I understood you correctly) were you right to say Paula Vennels (as she desires to be) was vilified, hugely or otherwise? I am not aware of any ad hominem attacks and simple sustained or even barbed commentary on her role as a CEO is hardly vilification. Relying on, and pointing out evidence, is not vilification. On the other hand, are you vilifying the hapless Stephen Bradshaw by describing him as 'ludicrous'? I did wonder, in the absence of detail, what aspect of the witness was ludicrous. Were his answers to Kay Burley like questions ( do you want to say sorry now...) from the phalanx of Kings Counsel, his black shirt and tie perhaps?Of course it was not his Liverpool accent, was it? Bradshaw was simply a low hanging foot soldier firing bullets made far higher up the foot chain.