Leadership Quote by George Carey

Calling yourself a "management bishop" is meant to sting: it suggests a cleric who swapped incense for spreadsheets, a CEO in a collar. Carey meets that critique head-on and flips the insult into a provocation. If the modern Church is accused of being bureaucratic, he implies, maybe the problem is a shallow idea of what "management" is. By invoking Jesus as a "management expert", Carey drags a supposedly secular skill back into sacred territory and dares his critics to admit that organization, strategy, and leadership were never alien to the Gospel.

The subtext is defensive but shrewd. Carey isn’t simply insisting he’s misunderstood; he’s trying to redefine the terms of the argument. "Management" becomes pastoral care at scale: feeding crowds, delegating to disciples, building a movement that can outlive its founder. The comparison is intentionally jarring, even slightly comic, because it collapses a gulf between corporate language and Christian story. That jolt is the point. It exposes how easily religious authority gets policed by aesthetic expectations: a bishop should sound mystical, not operational.

Context matters. Carey led the Church of England through late-20th-century institutional strain: declining attendance, media scrutiny, internal fights, and the constant pressure to justify establishment. In that climate, leadership is inevitably managerial. Carey's line is a rhetorical countermove: if you want the Church to survive as a public institution, you’ll need bishops who can run one. The danger, of course, is that the analogy also betrays anxiety: when you have to call Jesus a "management expert", you’re already conceding how thoroughly modern organizational logic has colonized spiritual life.