I have been thinking quite a bit about trust recently.
This began while I was facilitating a session on the Church of England’s report Trust and Trustworthiness in the Church of England. The report brings together Veronica Hope Hailey’s organisational research with a Theological Commentary by David Ford (GS 2457). It identifies both the familiar challenges of sustaining trust in a large organisation and some more distinctive features of the Church, including ambiguous authority, fragmented governance and patterns of behaviour that can conceal poor practice or deepen division.
In the theological commentary, Ford importantly argues that trust is not an optional organisational extra or marker of good practice. It belongs to our relationships with God and one another, to what it means to be the Church, and to what we hope for society. Christian trustworthiness begins with God’s prior gift of trust, grace, love and reconciliation. The institutional task is to receive and embody that gift in the ordinary patterns of Christian life.
GS 2457 affirms a need for sustained action in several areas where there are recognised challenges in trust and breakdowns in trustworthiness. This piece doesn’t seek to add further weight to this imperative. What I want to sketch here is a more general reflection on Ford’s gift of trust in Christ and the task for the Church in seeking an ethos of trust in practice.
Organisational research supports this emphasis. Trust grows when people experience consistency between what an organisation claims, what it rewards and what it does. An ethical culture is not simply having the right values or policies. It concerns the practices within which people make decisions and act. For the Church, however, this raises a further question. As Clare Watkins argues, an account of ‘Church management’ must take seriously both the Church’s theological identity and its institutional reality. We cannot simply adopt a good model of organisational culture and bless it. Our account must “do God” and “do Church”.
So, here are six ways of thinking into this task…
1. Formation: what are our practices forming us to become?
In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre describes practices as shared activities through which people pursue certain goods, learn standards of excellence and cultivate virtues.
We may say that it values honesty, humility and mutuality. But if its meetings reward defensiveness, its structures protect status or its decision-making teaches people to avoid responsibility, its repeated practices may be forming a very different ethos.
Trustworthiness requires formation. It concerns not only what we believe, but the habits, dispositions and character being cultivated through the practices of our common life.
This poses a sharper question than “What are our values?” It asks: what sort of people are our practices forming us to become?
2. Transformation: what do our practices disclose about God?
Elaine Graham’s Transforming Practice takes us further. Practices are not merely places where theological values are implemented or virtues cultivated. They can become locations in which God’s presence is discerned, disclosed and mediated.
This gives trustworthy practices a sacramental quality. They point beyond themselves and enable participation in God’s reconciling purposes.
This is not confined to worship. The Church’s governance, accountability and decision-making ‘practices’ as well as its practices of prayer, pastoral care and sacramental life, can also disclose something of God’s presence. Each should therefore be tested by a theological question: what do our practices reveal about the trustworthiness of the God in whom we say we believe?
3. Reflection: what is shaping the practices that shape us?
Practices are not automatically good simply because they are established Church practices, nor because they are recognised as organisational “best practice”.
Kathryn Tanner warns that Christian communities and institutions can absorb the assumptions of the surrounding culture while imagining themselves to be distinctive. Yet she also suggests that practices adopted from wider society can be “born again to new purpose” within Christian life.
The question is not simply whether a practice originated inside or outside the Church. It is whether it is being continually examined and reordered towards God’s purposes.
Our practices therefore need reflection and renewal, not mere repetition. They must remain open to interruption, judgement and reformation. Trustworthiness depends upon asking: what is shaping the practices that form us, and where are those practices strengthening or damaging our common life?
4. Mediation: how do we inhabit conflict faithfully?
Gillian Rose’s The Broken Middle challenges our fantasies of escaping the contradictions and compromises of social existence and therefore organisational life. Institutions are not places where shared goods unfold neatly. They contain competing responsibilities, unequal relationships and imperfect forms of mediation.
Church discourse can sometimes reach too quickly for unity, reconciliation or consensus. These are Christian goods to be sought – yet naming them does not bring them into being. Appeals to reconciliation can sometimes even obscure injury, difference or unequal power.
God’s gift of trust should enable deeper engagement with this “broken middle”, not provide a theological route around it. The question is therefore not simply how our practices can minimise conflict, but how they help us inhabit conflictual spaces truthfully and faithfully.
5. Recognition: can we sustain relationship across difference?
If Rose names that we live in a broken middle, Rowan Williams helps us think about how we encounter one another there.
In Solidarity: The Work of Recognition, Williams argues (among many things) that communities flourish when their common life sustains truthful relationships across difference, disagreement and failure. Recognition does not mean discovering that another person is like me, fitting them into our categories, or having to validate theirs. It means acknowledging personhood and other people’s sense of their own personhood; and starting there.
An ethos of trustworthiness needs practices through which people can disagree while continuing to recognise one another; speak truthfully and be heard; and remain in relationship without making agreement its precondition.
The question becomes: do our practices enable genuine recognition and solidarity, or do they demand either agreement or separation?
6. Perseverance: how do we remain faithful when trust is absent?
But what happens when recognition and reconciliation fail?
Ephraim Radner’s writing takes seriously the persistence of division within the Church. Sometimes trust is absent, reconciliation remains incomplete and fragmentation continue. Trustworthiness cannot therefore depend entirely upon our ability to repair relationships.
Radner directs us towards the costly practices of patience, endurance and communion amid fracture. This guards against an assumption that the right intervention will necessarily produce trust. Such experiences are not only points for reflection (following Tanner and Williams) but also points of disclosure (Graham) where we might encounter something of Christ’s brokenness for us within this. For Radner this is especially resonate in our fractured communion of one with another.
Trustworthiness may also be revealed in how people and institutions act when trust has not been restored: showing endurance, patience and costly communion amid fracture.
Becoming trustworthy
None of these perspectives provides a programme for fixing the Church. That may be one of their virtues. Together, however, they suggest that trustworthiness is both gift and task.
Trustworthy communities are formed through practices that cultivate virtue; transformed as Christ’s presence is disclosed and mediated; reordered through theological reflection; tested within conflict and ambiguity; sustained through recognition across difference; and revealed through faithfulness amid fracture.
The Church becomes credible not simply by explaining its theological identity, but by making that identity visible in the ordinary practices of worship, learning, loving, serving, governance, accountability and discernment.
That is the challenge of becoming trustworthy in practice.
A fuller article, including further discussion and a complete list of references, is available – just ask.
