[from MINISTRY DEVELOPMENT JOURNAL. NO. 9, 1986]
Ministry in the Year 2000
by Frank G. Kirkpatrick
By its very nature, the ministry of the Christian churches must remain flexible and adaptable to changing circumstances, even while maintaining contact with its roots in the unchanging and eternal faith out of which it springs. Before examining any particular forms of ministry in the years ahead, I think it is important to lay out the basic assumptions and principles on which all forms of Christian ministry must be based.
The ministry of the church is, above all, the ministry of the whole church, the ministry of the baptized body of Christians. As the 1979 Prayer Book says in the Catechism, "The ministers of the church are lay persons, bishops, priests and deacons." We are finally coming to recognize that it has been an historical error, with unintentional but debilitating consequences, to regard only those who are ordained to a ministry of word and sacrament as the sole or chief ministers of the church. This error has led to a hierarchical notion of privilege, the priestly assumption of status and control, and a lingering belief in a higher and lower
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morality for ordained and lay persons. It has made the church an institution for priests and bishops in which lay people are often regarded as necessary constituents but not as persons having mutual responsibilities and thus as not eligible to enjoy the perquisites of status, except as these are controlled and distributed by the clerical authority structure. This imperfect view of ministry had corrupted the core meaning of Christian community and allowed the church to become less than what it is called to be.
Total Ministry
By returning to a notion of total ministry, ministry as the work of the whole church, we will be freeing the church by the year 2000 to be itself. As John Macquarrie has said, "The ministry of the church is its work in helping to let-be the new community of beings."1 The foundation and source of all ministry is the redeemed community of persons who live out the forgiveness of sins and the empowerment of God's grace through koinonia, fellowship, mutual love and support. The church, as koinonia, assumes collegial and mutual relations among all its members. It should utilize a hierarchical structure only when this has been agreed upon by the community itself and it must regard that structure pragmatically, as a functionally effective way to carry out its larger purpose of total ministry, but always subservient to the primary meaning of collegiality and mutuality.
But the church as a koinonia, as a fellowship living a common life, sharing in the forgiveness of sins, remaining faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the breaking of the bread, and to the prayers, is the first concern of ministry. Unless we, as a fellowship, can witness in our own communal lives to the power of God's reconciliation, we cannot witness in a world which has not yet fully known his power.
There must be a ministry to the ministers. Historically, this ministry has been performed by those called to ordination for and by the community. The ordained are to equip the other ministers to do their work (Ephesians 4:12). They do this primarily by word and sacrament. As the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches has put it, "The chief responsibility of the ordained ministry is to assemble and build up the body of Christ by proclaiming and teaching the Word of God, by celebrating the sacraments, and by guiding the life of the community in its worship, its mission and its caring ministry."2 This is especially true in the Eucharist, in and through which Christ, represented through the priest or Bishop, "gathers, teaches and nourishes the church."3 But as representatives of Christ, the ordained ministers exercise authority as he exercised it, not by the assumption of privilege, status, or authoritarian control, but by humility, "by committing their life to the community," and by service even unto death itself. The ordained ministry continually reminds the community of its three-fold structure: kerygma, koinonia, and diakonia. The kerygma proclaims the faith, the koinonia experiences it, and the diakonia carries it out in service to the world. The ordained ministers are charged with the responsibility of serving the community by maintaining, deepening, and extending this structure through their preaching, their administration of the sacraments, and their pastoral care.
But the ordained minister also stands symbolically at the critical juncture between the koinonia and the world. Raised up by the community, he or she functions within it as the representative and proclaimer of its roots in the Gospel and as the one who celebrates the empowering grace of its sacraments. In this way, the ordained minister keeps the community in touch with its eternal and spiritual foundation, guarding the tradition and rehearsing the story on which the community is built. He or she also equips the other ministers within the koinonia for their work in the world; in this respect the ordained minister is the servant of the laity. As J.C. Hoekendijk puts it, “The layman is not the aid or an extension of the minister, a clergyman in miniature or caricature.”4
As equipper of other ministers and as proclaimer of
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the Gospel, the ordained minister will continually remind the community that total ministry means total service; ministering unto others because Christ ministered unto them. This ministry will be the ministry of reconciliation, proclaiming in word and deed within and to the world that God, through Christ, has made peace with the world (Ephesians 2:13-16). The reconciliation which Christ has achieved is itself rooted in God's love for his creation and in his decisive involvement with the created order through his Incarnation. This means that the principal concern of all ministry (working out of the koinonia) is the world, because the world is God's principal concern. And it is ministry to and for the world for which the laity is especially equipped and called. We need to reaffirm, as the establishment of the Vocational Diaconate has so clearly done, "that the world or extended community is the appropriate place for ministry."5
The ministry of the church must be realistic and attuned to the realities of the world. It must be focused upon persons, not as abstract entities drifting above the world in spiritual cocoons, but as embodied beings living and working within the complex interrelationships of earthly life. In this sense, ministry takes as the context of its discipleship the person "as he encounters us concretely in his life relationships and in the total structure of society."6 And this kind of discipleship is best exercised by the laity because it is the laity, above all, who live and work in this context. "In everyday life they can demonstrate something of the solidarity of Christ with the world. They are the bearers of the apostolate. It will become apparent whether a church takes the apostolate seriously by the manner in which she prepares ‘the members of God's mission people' (that, after all, is the meaning of the word laikoi) for their service."7
World Service
But service to the world does not mean sanctifying all that the world does. Service to the world must not become an opportunity for secularization by the world. Accepting the world is not a justification for cheap-grace acceptance of everything that the world does or says is good. There is a sense in which the church will always remain in but not of the world. It will live in a kind of perpetual diaspora, or exile from the Kingdom until it fully comes. This means that the church will live in the tension between love for the world as God intends it to be, and prophetic criticism of the world when it falls short of God's intention. The specific ministry of the church is to proclaim and practice reconciliation, to work against those structures and acts which impede peace and justice (the marks of reconciliation), and to announce the coming of the Kingdom of God. The church, through its lay ministry, will speak and act with prophetic power, without fear, and with effectiveness to all those situations and structures which presently obstruct or hinder the work of peacemaking, the establishment of social and economic justice, and the healing of reconciliation.
The church is called to convey through its internal life and external service "the image of a new humanity."8 This new image will often set the church and its values at odds with the world. The church may be suspect by many within the world; it may, on occasion, be persecuted and reviled, but it must at least be clear enough about its task that it should never be ignored. The greatest defeat for the church would be for the world to become indifferent to it. And this can only happen if the church becomes indifferent to the world or succumbs to its values. "If someone asks where the church is, then we ought to be able to answer; there, where people are emptying themselves as nothing; there, where people serve, not just a little, but in the total service which has been imitated from the Messiah-Servant and in which the cross comes into view; and there, where the solidarity with the fellowman is not merely preached but is actually demonstrated."9
Although the church must be careful not to succumb to worldly values or accept without criticism the "realism" of the world, to carry out its ministry effectively will take the expertise, the specific vocations, and the experience of persons who live in all the dimensions of worldly life. Unless the church can speak the languages of these dimensions, it has not done its job of equipping for ministry. As Hoekendijk
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puts it, "no one has the right to conceal the Christian faith in a language that cannot be understood by today's reader to the daily paper."10
This means that the church's ministry in the year 2000 will include and make use of persons with skills and experience in the multitude of structures which constitute the infrastructure of the world as it is. These persons, the ministers of the church, will know that their purpose is to proclaim the Kingdom through word and deed; but the church will also know that their strategic placement in the world and the utilization of their knowledge, training, and responsibility, is an essential part of its mission of reconciliation. Through this recognition of the indispensability of lay ministry, the old notion that only the ordained are doing the work of the church will have been laid to rest. The church will have come to see the importance and the strong revival of the old notion of vocation, the calling or work that one has been given in the world, in and through which one both serves the world and witnesses to the glory of God. The church will hold up a multitude of lay vocations as labors to which God has called a multitude of his people to a variety of ministries. It will, in particular, recognize those lay vocations which are especially concerned with the establishment of peace and justice since these are the essential and overriding marks of the Kingdom which is to come and of which the church as koinonia is a foretaste.
One important consequence of this revived notion of vocation and the burial of the notion that only the ordained are ‘truly’ called to God's service, will be that the councils of the church, its policies and decisions, will he shaped decisively by the wisdom of all its ministers, especially the laity. The church will learn how to adapt its tactics and practices (though not its underlying faith and mission) to the changing conditions of the world. Learning flexibility without distorting its vision will take the expertise of the laity and the continuity of the ordained. The ordained will remind the church, through their faithfulness to the tradition, that the New Testament "does not describe a single pattern of ministry which might serve as a blueprint or continuing norm for all future ministry in the church,"11 and the laity will instruct the church in effective ways through which ministry can be exercised in this time and place.
Much of the unnecessary hierarchical structure of present church authority will be removed. As John Miller has said, "There is tension that is very real as the church's life seeks to emulate its Servant Lord. In the Episcopal church our canons and structure are those of an hierarchical, autocratic and elitist community striving to realize itself in an environment that shows increasingly little tolerance for such qualities."12
Theological Education
While the ordained will, of necessity, have a depth of theological training not normally available to most lay persons, the church of the future will have to put much more stress on the theological training of all its ministers. If the ministry of the church is total ministry, and if it emerges out of a common faith and koinonia experience, then all ministers need to be grounded in the substance and meaning of that faith. One of the tasks of ministry in the future church will be to pay particular attention to theological education. The ordained will be especially equipped to provide this, but if there are lay persons with even greater theological expertise, they should assume that ministry for the community.
Of particular importance in the theological education of the koinonia must be the centrality and application of peace and justice. Peace and justice are not just incidental to the church; they are its internal meaning and its external responsibility. As a corporate body, the church must embody in its decisions what it means to make peace and justice overriding imperatives. This will mean responsiveness to those, both lay and clergy, who call for risky and prophetic forms of discipleship for the institution as well as for the individuals of the church.
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Within the koinonia itself, there will be a premium placed upon ordained persons who are theologically profound, sacramentally sensitive, homiletically effective, and pastorally skilled.
The church will be called upon in the years ahead to testify to the strength of God's grace in the midst of suffering and perhaps persecution. It will need to speak with bold prophesy to the principalities and powers of a broken world in which suffering can make credible witnesses to the power on which the church continually draws.
The church should seek those persons for ordination who feel called to it; who have a demonstrated capacity for leadership, especially through speech and prophetic action; who are seeking a collegial and shared form of ministry and authority; who are suspicious of worldly values such as status and the career ladder; who are not seeking clerical validation for authentic lay ministry; who are not simply seeking the protection of an ecclesiastical womb for fear of confronting the world; who can empower others to act responsibly in the world; and who have the gifts of healing and pastoral care.
There will be a tension in the future church between ordained persons whose gifts are particularly apt for a specific form of ministry, but by whom the whole church could be nourished. We do not want to ordain persons solely for one set of individual churches. The church, as a community of communities, should have enough of a common faith and experience that those equipped for the ministry of ordination can serve in any of its distinct bodies.
These reflections constitute only a broad context for discussion of the kinds of ministry which the church should seek and nourish by the year 2000. More specific directions must be a combined effort of lay and ordained as the church more fully embodies the meaning of total ministry. I have tried to establish some of the basic principles of ministry, within the church and by the church, for a world which I believe should guide the church's discussion in the exciting years ahead as it seeks to make its discipleship more fruitful and fulfilling.
Notes
1. John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1966), p. 374.
2. Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry. Faith and Order Paper No. 111. (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982), p. 22.
3. Ibid.
4. J.C. Hoekendijk, The Church Inside Out. Edited by L.A. Hoedemaker and Peiter Tijmes, translated by Isaac C. Rottenberg. (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1964), pp. 86-7.
5. John Miller, "The Vocational Diaconate: A Position Paper Presented to the Provincial Conference on the Diaconate." (Andover, MA, May 24-25. 1985), p. 11, (Unpublished, typescript).
6. Hoekindijk, p. 85.
7. Ibid.
8. Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, p. 23.
9. Hoekendijk, p. 71.
10. Ibid., p. 75.
11. Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, p. 24.
12. Miller, p. 6.
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick is Associate Professor of Religion, Trinity Colleges Hartford, Connecticut. He is Chairperson of the Examining Chaplains' Committee of the Commission on Ministry in the Diocese of Connecticut.
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