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34 The shared ministry of ministers and elders in every council is of particular value to the United Reformed Church. It demonstrates a collaborative understanding of leadership, exercised corporately in an atmosphere of mutual accountability. The ministry of minister and elders is distinct but complementary - each is incomplete without the other. This is faithful to the spirit of the Geneva Reformation but the practice has evolved over the years with different emphases in different Reformed churches throughout the world.

35 Calvin's concern was to ensure the good ordering of the Church on a scriptural basis. In the Institutes, 4.3.8, he advocates that each church have 'a senate' of ministers and elders, whose classic role was 'in pronouncing censures and exercising discipline'. This disciplinary system was taken up in the Westminster Confession and Form of Church Government, 1646, which became the standard for the Church of Scotland and the Presbyterian churches throughout the English-speaking world.

36 For Calvin, pastoral care, in the narrower sense of care for the needy, was the responsibility of deacons. But towards the end of the 16th century, elders were tending to assume the functions of deacons in relation to the poor - a model of eldership that was revived by Thomas Chalmers in Scotland in the 19th century and which is integral to the United Reformed Church practice today. The Elders' Meeting also sees that public worship is regularly offered and that the sacraments are duly administered. This emphasis is also found in Calvin, but it has been enhanced by insights inherited from the Churches of Christ tradition in this country, where elders played an important role in leading worship and preaching as well as in pastoral care.

37 Every local United Reformed Church has an Elders' Meeting consisting of men and women over the age of eighteen, who have been chosen by the whole membership for their Christian maturity to share with the minister in the oversight and pastoral care of the church. At the heart of both the ministry of Word and Sacrament and the ministry of the Elder today is the equipping of every member for his or her calling. Elders are ordained by the local congregation to their ministry of shared leadership, pastoral care, and the equipping of the people of God. That ordination is for life and is recognised throughout the United Reformed Church. The wider councils of the church normally consist of ministers and elders.

38 The gift of eldership came to the United Reformed Church from the Presbyterian Church of England. The Congregational Church had a similar ministry exercised by deacons but they were not ordained, although many served for long years and a few were honoured with the title 'life-deacon.' Today, elders rarely serve for an unlimited, continuous period. In most churches, elders serve for a limited term and are then expected to take a sabbatical period as non-serving elders. When, after a period as a non-serving elder, an elder is called again to serve a particular church at a particular time, he or she is inducted to that new period of service, not re-ordained. The elders are the faithful core of the church's life.

39 Certain ecclesiological and pastoral principles seemed to emerge from this presentation of the principles and practice of eldership in the United Reformed Church.

• the ministry of the elder emerges from the ministry of the whole people of God as elders are chosen by the members.
• their representative ministry is exercised in all the councils of the church. Such representative ministry is valued in all the churches.
• the Elders Meeting is a good example of shared authority and collegiality of oversight and it embodies a formal commitment to corporate responsibility.
• the ministry of the elder is specifically intended to be an enabling ministry, to equip all the people of God in their particular ministries
• elders are chosen for their Christian maturity rather than for any specific gifts or skills. Their term of office as serving elders may be of several years' duration and they may serve several terms. The church often receives from its elders a maturity and continuity of leadership.

The Church of England and Methodist members were able to identify various lay ministries and forms of church government in the life of their churches which also expressed these principles.

All three churches were able to affirm these as sound and desirable ecclesiological and pastoral principles for local church leadership.

40 The United Reformed Church practice of ordaining elders presented difficulties. The Church of England, in particular, sees ordination as necessarily including the ministry of Word and Sacrament. The United Reformed Church, in common with most of the Reformed family, sees ordination as also being appropriate for other ministries. In Eldership in the Reformed Churches Today (Studies from the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, no. 22, 1990) the ordination of elders is described as follows:

"Ordination is an act of consecration to service through a particular office or ministry. It is an acknowledgement by the Church that the person ordained has been empowered and equipped for that ministry by the Holy Spirit and has been recognized and called to that ministry by the Church."(8a)

 

41 It was noted that, although elders are ordained into a ministry of the whole United Reformed Church, the local congregation has full authority to choose and ordain them and they are accountable to the local congregation alone. No training is required before ordination and, although most synods and district councils offer in-service training, it is neither accredited nor obligatory. The comments made by the Church of England and Methodist members about the lack of authorisation of elders by the wider church showed that more work was needed on the three churches' understanding of 'local' and 'Church'. The questions pressed on the voluntary nature of the training and the lack of formal accreditation (which would probably not have been asked in relation to Methodist Stewards or Church of England Church Wardens because they are not ordained) indicated the need for further work on the different understandings of ordination. The fact that the wider councils of the United Reformed Church normally consist solely of ministers and elders seemed to the Methodist and Anglicans members to limit the ministry of the whole people of God.

42 A paper on Representative Ministry, which had been presented by Paul Avis to the Formal Conversations, proved very relevant to this discussion. The paper sought to find a way of valuing the great variety of ministries within the ministry of all the baptized, yet without equating ministry with every aspect of Christian discipleship. Two of the concerns expressed by the Methodist Church and the Church of England about elders in the United Reformed Church - that their ordination opened the door to a whole range of possible ordained ministries, and that councils of ministers and elders limited the ministry of all the baptized - had clear connections with this paper's attempt to wrestle with how to recognise and value the full range of particular ministries within the whole ministry of the people of God.

43 The issue of eldership, although potentially divisive, in fact led to considerable convergence. It was recognised that each tradition located oversight and authorised ministries at what it believed to be an ecclesiologically appropriate place. However, in response to the need for a contemporary missionary strategy, all three churches were developing new forms of lay leadership alongside the traditional ones, and expanding the role of locally ordained ministers or ministers in local appointment. As the group talked of the traditional roles of Local and Lay Preachers, Elders, Stewards, Pastoral Visitors, Church Wardens, Sidesmen, Readers, Licensed Lay Workers, Lay Pastoral Assistants, Church Army Officers and Church Related Community Workers, and the new emerging roles of Local Church Leaders, Mission Enablers, Worship Leaders and Evangelists, it was clear that there was considerable convergence in both ecclesiology and practice.

44 The pattern of shared leadership between such lay ministers and those ordained to the ministry of Word and Sacrament also seemed to be changing. In both the Methodist Church and the Church of England the growing number of ministers ordained only to a local appointment raises new questions. Deacons in the Methodist Diaconal Order, who play a significant role in the leadership team of some local churches, are ordained to the ministry of Christ's Church, but not to a ministry of Word and Sacrament. Ordained ministry in the Church of England is developing in several ways, for example in the work being done on issues related to a distinctive diaconate.

More work is needed on the place of ordination and authorisation in this range of ministries.