This year’s MODEM annual conference, run in association with the Susanna Wesley Foundation, took place on Tuesday, 1st December (9.30-3.30). Given the restrictions due to Covid-19, the conference was online.
MODEM is a national ecumenical Christian network, which encourages authentic dialogue between exponents of leadership, organisation, spirituality and ministry to aid the development of better disciples, community, society and world.
Theme for the 2020 conference
There is understandable scepticism that the social and political structures that affect everyday life can be held to account. It is not difficult to find poor performance that hasn’t been challenged, systemic problems that are repeatedly investigated without real change and public policy that lets down those most in need. This day conference looked head on at the challenges of accountability whilst opening up your own work to the same questions.
Three people who are in positions of being held to account and holding others to account opened up about the challenges they face:
Christine Allen
Director of CAFOD
Vic Rayner
Executive Director of the National Care Forum
Marvin Rees
Mayor of Bristol
Alongside this Dr Helen Cameron (Practical theologian and Research Associate, Centre for Baptist Studies, Regent’s Park College, Oxford) summarised some of the current academic thinking about accountability and related it to themes in Christian theology.
Rev Mike Long, Notting Hill Methodist Church, London, offered a closing reflection linking the day’s presentations to his experience of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry.
Key issues were drawn from this and participants given an opportunity in small groups to reflect upon them.
This conference was for everyone involved in organisational life and leadership – both those within churches and faith organisations, as well as those within secular organisations.