Pray with the Pope: The Vocation of Admin

Pope’s prayer intention for May: We pray that Church movements and groups may rediscover their mission of evangelisation each day, placing their own charisms at the service of needs in the world.

The past week I have been learning how to use an accounting software package called Quickbooks online. It has been, as they say, a steep learning curve, and I’m not yet convinced that the programme deserves the adjective “quick”. Perhaps our forefathers and foremothers dealt with accounting tasks more rapidly using old-fashioned ledgers!

I belong to the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) whose mission is to “find God in all things”, to “save souls”, and all manner of permutations and combinations of the two. Yet, I find myself — temporarily, I hope — enmeshed in a net of admin.

Of course, admin can and should be a means of service and love of God and neighbour. A well-run parish or school or hospital or religious congregation will obviously serve others better than a badly-run one.

And yet, we do so often struggle to strike the correct balance between the admin and the actual mission of an organisation. We can get so caught up in meetings about our work, writing reports assessing it, and crafting proposals for new types of work, that we never get out there and actually do the work. The problem has been lampooned by the phrase, “To Jesus through meetings”.

How then, in the pope’s words, to “rediscover our mission of evangelisation each day, placing our charisms at the service of needs in the world”?

One thing that strikes me more and more from my new vantage point of an administrator, is that we absolutely have to attract the right people.

If we have members of “Church movements and groups” who are truly motivated by the charisms or the gifts of the Spirit, then their main focus will be on service. They will give positive energy and direction to the organisation. They will understand that the organisation is at the service of others, rather than to their own benefit. They will need less administrative control.

The threat of corruption

This blessed state of affairs is more difficult to achieve than one would imagine. A young confrere was describing to me recently the extraordinarily elaborate structures built into the administration of the religious NGO he is working with. Everything is recorded and reported back to the funders. Part of this has to do with the important virtue of accountability, but another part of it is due to the fact that funders know that even NGOs suffer from the tendency to become self-serving.

Disappointing stories abound of how apparently generous NGO workers ended up becoming lazy, intoxicated with power, or getting their fingers in the till. In one case, a few years back, seven years of looting by a single individual caused the entire NGO to collapse and die.

So when we look at organisations like Eskom, we can see that the Church has the same challenge — namely to attract people of very high integrity who get it that what they are called to do is to serve God and the common good. It is in the search for such people that the administration often needs to be strengthened, not in setting up fancy systems to catch out members who lack integrity.

If we can seek out and find people of integrity who have a true sense of vocation and an understanding of the charism of the group, then we will be home and dry. We will be able to engage our energies more with the direct service of the Gospel.