I recently preached about the movement from disciple to leadership. As part of that, I looked at the etymology of the English word “leader”. It comes from Middle English leden, from Old English lǣdan, and is akin to Old High German, leiten. As such, that word seems to only be part of our language for about a millennium.
The older word is actually, “conductor” – going right back to the Latin ducere, “to lead”. And something has changed in the use of the word “conductor”.
Before 1800, “the conductor” of a musical group, ie the actual leader of the orchestra, played an instrument in that orchestra. The separation of leadership and actual playing only happened after that time.
This style of leadership – separate from the actual activity one is leading – is increasing. Management is increasingly removed from needing to be competent within the context of what one is leading. A chief executive officer can move from running a hospital to running a branch of a city council to overseeing any number of organisations and institutions.
This trajectory is seen in the shift in word usage from “conductor” (being the preferred word for a leader) playing an instrument to the conductor not playing in the orchestra one leads.
This management style is influencing priesthood – with office hours, management skills, CVs, job applications rather than a call…
To return to etymology, “priest” comes from the Greek πρεσβῠ́τερος. You can even see it in the letters: priest = PRESbuTeros. It means “elder”. Someone older is clearly leading not from ‘outside’ the group (as it were) – in the sense of the non-playing-conductor, or of the brought-in CEO. Someone older is leading from within the group. The priest is a playing coach. The priest is a pre-1800 conductor.
Ps. The priest is not necessarily biologically older than all in the community. Do you see how that might connect with the previous conversations here about calling a priest, “Father”?
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Ordinarily I’d rile at the comparison between a leader of a church community and the leader of an orchestra. It’s often made in theological circles as a kind of smarty-clever image of leadership, and begs the question of how conductors take a priestly character. If you want to test the reversal of the idea, dip into Norman Lebrecht’s book on conductors in the twentieth century and wonder at the high idealism that goes hand-in-glove with what we would now consider a serious lack of people skills.
But you’ve offered something a little more helpful here, Bosco, by redeeming the image with reference to evolving practice from the eighteenth century. Conductors became necessary as music became more complex and orchestras became larger. The problem with the Conductor/CEO model of clergy leadership is that it has arisen as the churches have contracted in size, and local communities are becoming smaller. The type of complexity most clergy have to face in parish life connects to small group dynamics and the ways long-term conflict can sit unresolved in a parish for generations. The C/CEO approach lacks the flexibility to recognise its limits, explore other approaches to unbinding communities from conflict, and unfortunately it has become very prevalent in Australian Anglicanism.
As to calling clergy Fr or Mother. After a solid formation in Anglo-Catholicism I only do it now in very formal situations. Few of the clergy I have had sustained dealings with over the last ten years have performed a role of spiritual nurture: a few of them have been employers, and of those, all have operated in the C/CEO mode. As a matter of self-preservation I no longer mix pastoral and professional connections, much to the chagrin of one parish priest for whom I work. My spiritual life is nurtured in places where titles matter less. I object to calling clergy by parental titles because of the infantilising character it casts on the relationship, and when the priest acts out of the C/CEO model it is potentially abusive. No one in Toscanini’s orchestras ever questioned his artistic leadership, and none would have dreamed of calling him Papa…
Very, very helpful points, thanks, Kieran, to which I would add that, in my looking around, small (Anglican) (parish) communities have become (unhelpfully?) normative. [They are unhelpful when, say, the community of about a hundred is so homogenous (in age and/or type) that they do not sacramentally reflect society/their context]. So, yes, I see real value in a smallish (parish) community – diverse in age and type. But it often seems to me that our clergy are now formed and trained in such a way that a larger community cannot be grown by them. There is a gear change above a certain size. And your comment points to this insight. Blessings.