MSE/WPs and working within organisations

The French worker priests felt obliged to work alongside those on the bottom edge of the organisational hierarchy,in solidarity with them and the better to bring the gospel to them. (And also, the better to understand the gospel for themselves).

Today, many MSE/WPs (that is, ordained, working people) occupy other levels of responsibility and authority within the organisational structures to which they sell their labour. Does this raise new questions? I think it does, and that MSE/WPs have not done enough thinking about these.

A relevant context is the Christian's engagement with the 'powers and principalities' that exist within organisational structures.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
Ephesians 6.12

This is a large subject, and all I want to suggest now is that the powers and principalities give rise to corporate and organisational sin. A question for MSW-WPs is how they seek to spot and respond to such? And is it a different level of discernment and response if the MSE/WP holds organisational seniority or clout?

"People are veritably besieged, on all sides, at every moment simultaneously by these claims and strivings of the various powers each seeking to dominate, usurp, or take a person’s time, attention, abilities, effort; each grasping at life itself; each demanding idolatrous service and loyalty. In such a tumult it becomes very difficult for a human being even to identify the idols that would possess him or her… " William Stringfellow

I reckon these are important matters for all conscientious Christian people as they navigate their way around the powers and principalities of our day, not least in the workplace. It seems a reasonable expectation that priests who operate most closely within these realities might be expected to chart them. This seems a rather neglected area of Christian praxis, one that MSE-WPs might have something to contribute to.

Links

Some of those considering the powers and principalities as manifested in the organisations and structures of our world: William Stringfellow; Walter Wink; René Girard.

"According to the Bible, the principalities are legion in species, number, variety and name. They are designated by such multifarious titles as powers, virtues, thrones, authorities, dominions, demons, princes, strongholds, lords, angels, gods, elements, spirits… And if some of these seem quaint, transposed into contemporary language they lose quaintness and the principalities become recognizable and all too familiar: they include all institutions, all ideologies, all images, all movements, all causes, all corporations, all bureaucracies, all traditions, all methods and routines, all conglomerates, all races, all nations, all idols. Thus, the Pentagon or the Ford Motor Company or Harvard University or the Hudson Institute or Consolidated Edison or the Diners Club or the Olympics or the Methodist Church or the Teamsters Union are principalities. So are capitalism, Maoism, humanism, Mormonism, astrology, the Puritan work ethic, science and scientism, white supremacy, patriotism, plus many, many more—sports, sex, any profession or discipline, technology, money, the family—beyond any prospect of full enumeration. The principalities and powers are legion." William Stringfellow

Employing organisations can become places that are inimical to the freedom spoken of in the Gospels. When this happens, what is the Christian response?