Before I was a priest I was an entrepreneur and ran a brand agency. I am not at all ashamed of this. In those years I met and worked with many fine people. I found banks and bankers to be honourable and gracious. I loved the sheer challenge of solving business problems. And I also believe that creating wealth is essential for a just and fair country. I am not at all anti-business or disdainful of it.
But I did, and I do, find some things about corporate life funny. I have just got back from a week's holiday. We stayed at a nice hotel and one morning the breakfast hall was just about full of people obviously on a corporate team-building event.
I have to say first of all that the people on the corporate away-thing were all adults. I noticed that they were all wearing badges, and that's where I began to have a problem with the willing suspension of disbelief. Here was a perfectly normal fellow wearing a huge badge. He was apparently a TEAM MEMBER. There was another person who was a BENCHMARKER. And then there was a CHANGE AGENT. All we needed was a DREAM-WEAVER and I could have shouted 'Bingo!'
My word! Fancy having to walk around all day with a piece of business jargon pinned to your chest. It was all the more semi-tragic because the folk were all so serious. I imagine a fight to the death to move up from TEAM MEMBER to CHANGE AGENT. This is the kind of weird corporate hubris that The Office so vividly featured. Who could forget the conflict over the stapler between Gareth and Tim? Perhaps Ricky Gervais' insight is into the way corporate culture can infantilise otherwise grown-up people.
And then I spotted a rebel. He had his badge on upside-down.
I think that as a Christian I want to avoid labels and badges. I wonder what corporate badges the disciples might have worn, if they'd come on a corporate away-thing with our Lord? Given how hapless they often were, perhaps something like MISTAKE-MAKER. But I have the sense that Jesus wasn't a labels kind of guy at all.
I am trying to understand why I reacted against the badges. After all I wear a badge to help identify my role – it's a dog collar. It was partly that our corporate friends were speaking incredibly loudly and were getting all intense about being change agents over a croissant. It was partly because wearing a huge great badge with a piece of jargon on it seemed odd (though I have been out of the corporate world for more than a decade now).
I think it was mainly something saying to me that we take our work life too seriously and our life with Jesus not seriously enough. Or perhaps its just that I'm an old punk rocker from Northolt who needs to grow up a bit myself.
Rev Steve Morris is the parish priest of St Cuthbert's North Wembley. Before being a priest he was a writer and ran a brand agency. In the 1980s he tried to become a pop star. Follow him on Twitter @SteveMorris214
