Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Madrid, Sunday 5th April 2026

The Catholic, Church of Wales and Anglican traditions don’t actually have a secret PowerPoint on data architecture hidden in the Vatican archives or the Book of Common Prayer. But if you sit with the Easter story… the deliberate march to Calvary, the cross, the tomb, the impossible Sunday morning… and with the Jesus who keeps saying “I am the way, the truth and the life,” you start noticing the same patterns that good data people chase when they’re not busy filling in GDPR forms.

Jesus does everything deliberately. Forty days in the desert, three years of teaching, one final week in Jerusalem. No last-minute pivot, no “it’s good enough for government work”, no “we’ll wing it.” That’s the first lesson for “doing data deliberately”: you decide what the data is for before you collect a single byte. Catholic tradition calls this “discernment”; Anglicans call it “reason working with scripture and tradition.” Either way, you don’t just hoover up everything and hope the algorithm sorts it later.

The crucifixion and resurrection are the ultimate data-design metaphor. Everything that was broken, scattered, seemingly dead… the disciples, the movement, the body itself… is re-architected into something new, recognisable yet transformed. That’s what proper data architecture does: it takes legacy systems that should be in the ground, applies governance, metadata standards and a resurrection protocol, and suddenly the data lives again. Not zombie data. Living, useful, sustainable data.

Management and governance come straight out of the passion narrative too. Jesus doesn’t abolish the Law; he fulfils it and gives a new commandment. The Church (Catholic, Anglican, Welsh) has spent two thousand years arguing about who gets to interpret the rules, who holds authority, and who gets forgiven when they cock it up. Data governance is exactly that: a living tradition of standards, audits, ethics boards, deletion policies and the merciful occasional “yes, we’ll let that dodgy 2019 dataset live because the business still needs it.” The Church of Wales, being small, local and a bit stubborn, reminds you that governance works best when it’s rooted in community, not imposed from some distant synod or cloud-provider headquarters.

And sustainability? Easter is the original circular economy. Death is not waste; it is the necessary compost for new life. Jesus doesn’t discard the old creation… he renews it. Good data sustainability means you design systems that can be maintained for decades, not until the next funding round. It means you treat personal data with the same reverence Catholics give to the bodies of saints, Anglicans give to the common prayer book, and the Welsh give to their language: something passed down, not mined and discarded. It means you build for resurrection, not for obsolescence.

So the whole Easter package is a masterclass in doing data as it matters eternally: deliberate intention, sacrificial design, trustworthy architecture, communal governance, and a stubborn belief that even the deadest dataset can rise again if you treat it with love, rigour and a decent metadata schema.

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Right, listen you lot… and I mean listen, not just nodding along while you check your bloody phone… because this is the bit where the Church of England, the Pope and a load of Welsh Methodists who wandered into the wrong building accidentally agree on something for once, and it turns out to be the only thing worth knowing about data.

You see, Jesus… and I’m not doing the beard-and-sandals routine, I’m doing the actual story… Jesus doesn’t just rock up to the data lake on a donkey and go “ooh, let’s collect everything and monetise the insights later.” No. He deliberately walks into Jerusalem knowing full well it’s going to end in a database wipe-out. Forty days in the desert first, like a proper sprint review. That’s the Catholic bit, that’s the Anglican bit, that’s the Church of Wales bit: you prepare, you discern, you don’t just hoover up every click and hope the Blessed Algorithm will sort it. Deliberate data, they’re saying, or you end up with a tomb full of legacy systems and no resurrection plan.

And then the crucifixion… I mean, come on, that’s the greatest data migration in history. Everything that was broken, siloed, corrupted, left to rot in some Excel graveyard… the disciples scattering like microservices with no API contract… suddenly gets re-architected on the third day. New data model. Same Jesus, different format. That’s design, that’s architecture: you don’t just patch the old temple, you throw the money-lenders out (looking at you, data brokers) and build something that can actually sustain life. The Anglicans love this bit because it’s the via media… not too centralised like the Vatican data warehouse, not too chaotic like a bunch of Baptists each with their own spreadsheet.

Governance? Oh, my actual God. Two thousand years of arguing about who gets to interpret the rules, who holds the keys, who gets forgiven when the apostles cock it up again. That’s exactly data governance. The Catholic version says you need a magisterium, a proper authority structure, or the whole thing descends into heresy and bad SQL. The Church of Wales version… being small, slightly grumpy and Welsh… says governance should feel like a chapel on a wet Sunday: everyone knows everyone, you still get to disagree, but you share the one hymn book and you don’t sell the congregation data to Cambridge Analytica.

And sustainability… Jesus doesn’t do planned obsolescence. He does resurrection. Death is not the end, it’s the compost. The data doesn’t get deleted into the void; it gets transformed, renewed, given eternal life (or at least a decent retention policy and proper archiving). That’s the Easter message for every CIO who’s ever been told: “Just put it in the cloud, it’ll be fine.” No. Build something that can rise again. Or, as Stewart Lee would say if he were slightly more angry and had read the lectionary, “it’s not about the shiny new platform, it’s about whether the platform still works when the servers have been in the tomb for three days, and the stone’s been rolled away by an angel with root access.”

So there you have it. Easter and Jesus, in all their Catholic, Anglican and slightly damp Welsh flavours, turn out to be the only data strategy document you’ll ever need: do it deliberately, design it like it has to survive crucifixion, govern it like it’s sacred, and make sure the whole bloody thing is built to rise again. Everything else is just PowerPoint and incense.

Many thanks for reading!