Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.
If only the four major Churches which tendered and won large contracts to provide employment services to the unemployed had heeded the words of their own Saviour. But no, church bureaucracies have taken the running and church leaders have been unwilling or unable to intervene.
One of the hallmarks of bureaucracies is the desire for self-perpetuation, often not stopping to think why the organisation exists the first place. It is a rare day for a bureaucracy to announce that it has done its job and it should be wound up. To the contrary if one function is lost, they find another.
When the charitable agencies of the church tendered for contracts to provide the unemployed with help getting jobs, Church leaders failed to ask the fundamental question: what are we here for? Sure, the churches are there to help the poor, the dispossessed, the disabled and so on. Often that might include helping the unemployed. But it should not include entering into a formal contract with the government to provide expert job-searching services for the unemployed. That is an economic task, a task of government. It is not a charitable task. It is not a task done for love, but a task done for money.
True, charitable actions require money, but the Churches should be careful where the money for their charitable work comes from. To be true to their mission, the source of church money should be love and charity, not contractual.
Last week the Bishop of Wagga Wagga, William Brennan, articulated why the Catholic Church should not be in the business of contracting with the Government to help find jobs for the unemployed. One of the main reasons is that the church becomes an agent of Government. He said, “”The church and society have different goals that should be kept separate. Each is appropriate in its own domain, and an attempt to merge or blend the two results in a distortion of the role of each in human life.”
It is likely that the church will suffer because it will always have an eye to next year’s contract; to the performance benchmarks and to the tests of corporate life. Government suffers because there is a danger that church-run organisations will favour people of that church for employment in the agency and as customers of it.
The scale of the change is enormous. Four of Australia’s largest church charities will earn about $700million from the Government over the next three years from contracts to find jobs for the unemployed.
Salvation Army Employment Plus could earn up to $277.6 million, and becomes by far the largest job agency in Australia. Mission Australia can earn up to $241.6 million and becomes the second largest player. The Catholic Church’s Centacare Australia Ltd can earn up to $86.6 million, and Wesley Uniting Employment $82 million.
The $700 million from the employment contracts are worth almost a third of the total donations from business and individuals to the four churches of about $2 billion a year.
On this scale the contracts are bound to change the functioning and mission of these charities.
The Government may feel it has done a “”good deal” by outsourcing the job search function. Church workers are likely to work harder and longer for less out of a sense of mission than government workers. But society loses on other scores. The charities will be distracted from hard-case charity to concentrate on the money-yielding cases. And as Bishop Brennan pointed out, others were willing to do this work. They will have no role. Also, having taken the money, the churches might be compromised in their role as critics of government in other areas.
In the meantime, the Government will have to look at the churches’ new status. Hitherto, their purely charitable nature warranted extensive tax exemptions and concessions. Further, it was appropriate to exempt them from anti-discrimination laws so they could have a religious qualification when employing people to do charitable work.
Now, however, they are contractors for government work. In that capacity they are competing against the private sector which has no such tax or discrimination exemptions. Also, with the church agencies doing what hitherto was government work, having any form of religious test for employment is not appropriate. But without a religious test, the church agency will lose its character.
In three years’ time when these contracts are renewed, the churches should have a long hard look at whether they should be in government work. But by then it might be too late. The money-changers will have taken over the temple.