Leadership Quote by Arthur Middleton

A politician warning the Church about turning priests into managers is never just a churchy complaint; it’s a power map. Middleton’s line is built to shame a particular kind of “thinking in the Church” as bureaucratic drift: the priest demoted from sacramental authority to something like a corporate executive, answerable to process, budgets, committees, and measurable outputs. Calling him a “mere functionary” is the key insult. Functionaries don’t interpret mysteries; they execute policy.

The subtext is an old institutional fight dressed in clerical clothing: who gets to define the Church’s identity when modern administration becomes unavoidable? Middleton frames “administration” as an invasive logic that doesn’t simply support doctrine and worship but replaces them as the organizing principle. That’s why the sentence escalates from job description (“managing director”) to existential threat (“determine the form of the Church”). He’s saying governance isn’t neutral; it reshapes theology by stealth.

Context matters: Middleton is writing from an 18th-century Atlantic world where churches were entangled with state power, property, and social order, and where Enlightenment rationality and institutional reform were pressuring older hierarchies. A politician would be especially sensitive to the way institutions get hollowed out by managerial language, because politics is where ideals routinely become procedure. The irony is that his critique is also administrative: he’s trying to police the Church’s internal job description to protect a certain settlement of authority. In a single sentence, he anticipates a modern anxiety: when institutions optimize for management, they start to forget what they exist to do.