ABSTRACT
The Church of England, in every age, has faced fundamental challenges. The Church of England appears to have opted for the safety of compliance and secular complicity with managerialism, and for the target-driven pseudo-empiric, by which it judges its efficacy. Yet the church exists to glorify God and follow Jesus Christ. The Church of England is clearly a highly divergent body struggling with the imposition of convergent structures and solutions. The Church of England drew the membership of the Commission from Donald Allchin, John Austin Baker, Christopher Evans, Leslie Houlden, John Macquarrie, John Packer, Hugh Turner, Arthur Peacocke, Maurice Wiles, Michael Green–among others. The Church of England generally assumes that its structures–even quite recent ones–are ‘ordained’. The singular challenge that the church faces today is that of distraction; but its two sides are an obsession with mission on the one hand, and with management on the other.
