AN ESSAY PREPARED WITH THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF THE URC MINISTRIES’
COMMITTEE’S WORKING PARTY ON FUTURE PATTERNS OF MINISTRY BY THE REVD
BILL SEWELL (WELLS NEXT THE SEA) APRIL 2002
TO EQUIP THE SAINTS
Within a couple of weeks of retirement after
serving for over forty years first as a Congregational minister and,
since its inauguration in 1972, as a minister of the United Reformed
Church, I came across some comments which proved salutary, if
disturbing, reading. They were contained in a Guardian profile of the
playwright Sir David Hare. In it Nicholas Wroe tells us that Hare’s
play Racing Demon, about the struggles of a group of South London
clergy - with and between themselves and with their environment - was
conceived as a result of a visit to the Church of England’s General
Synod at York in 1987. There Hare “surprised himself by being ‘deeply
moved by the vicars in their herringbone jackets and flannels and
their hopeless disorder and well-meaningfulness’ ... who, you would
have said, if you were caricaturing David’s work, that he would
mock.... What is so touching is that he takes them seriously. He says
‘ here are people trying to leave the world better when they go out
than when they came in’ ” (The Guardian, November 13th 1999).
Those more accustomed than Hare to using the language of Canaan would
probably have chosen rather different words to describe their aims,
preferring, perhaps, language about the kingdom of God. But in good
Anglo-Saxon Hare had put his finger on the nub of the matter. The
mission of the church and of its ministers is all about changing the
world. His words inescapably raised for me the question whether I,
after all these years in active ministry, had left the world a better
place.
On reflection I quickly came to the conclusion that it was not simply
a matter of how faithfully I personally had fulfilled my commission -
that is something of which ultimately God alone must be the judge; so,
be re-assured straightaway that in what follows there will be no
introspection, no personal reminiscence and, emphatically, no
attempted apologia pro vita mea. I am not so vain as to imagine that
such an inquest would command any reader’s interest. What has driven
me to write is a growing conviction that the mould into which, as a
minister of word and sacrament within the Reformed tradition, I had
been poured, and the framework - doctrinal, institutional and
administrative - in which that ministry has been exercised have
militated as much against as for “leaving the world better”.
If explicit allegiance to the Christian Church is in any way a
criterion for judging the state of the world, there can be little
doubt that my part of the world is no better at the end of the
twentieth century than it was in the middle. Statistics are
notoriously slippery tools, and notoriously difficult to interpret,
but it is probably safe to say that there are barely half the
committed adherents of the mainstream churches in Britain that there
were in the middle of that century. We live far more obviously in a
post-Christian society than we did then. Yet up to the present the
churches, not least that to which the author belongs, have deployed an
enormous proportion of their budgets on the maintenance of the sort of
ministry I have been exercising. To what effect?
When in July 2000 the General Assembly of the United Reformed Church
instructed the Ministries Committee to do more work on future patterns
of ministry in the hope of making a more effective response to the
missionary task we face, it implicitly recognised that there is to-day
not merely something of a crisis in its practice of ministry but also
of the theological understanding on which that practice is based.
However those of us who profess faith in the Crucified know that we
can never view a crisis purely in negative terms: it is also an
opportunity to catch a new vision and a new hope. What follows then
represents one minister’s expression of that hope. I have been led to
dig into the foundations of the tradition in which I have lived to see
whether there is not a better and more effective way of looking at
things.
The title I have given this essay is taken from the New Revised
Standard Version’s translation of a verse in the, probably
post-Pauline, Letter to the Ephesians (Eph 4 12). This defines the
purpose of those called to a variety of ministries as “to equip the
saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ”.
This, it will emerge, is as useful a definition as can be found of the
function of those called to ordained ministry in the church: the
business of ministers is to enable all those who confess the faith of
Christ, crucified and risen, to be themselves effective ministers. I
am inviting you therefore to look first in some detail at that
ministry to which the whole people of God is called, and only then
consider what sort of equipment they need from an ordained ministry,
if they are to play their full and proper part in God’s mission to the
world. My prayer is that in that way, as the same passage goes on to
put it “all of us (may) come to the unity of the faith and of the
knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full
stature of Christ”. What else, after all, is the task of the churches
as they face the Third Christian Millennium?
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THE MINISTRY OF THE WHOLE PEOPLE OF GOD
The United Reformed Church’s Basis begins its
statement on “Ministry in the United Reformed Church” with a short and
rather general paragraph on the way in which “the Lord Jesus Christ
continues his ministry in and through the Church, the whole people of
God” (Basis of Union 19). This is followed by seven, more substantial,
paragraphs on the gift of and calling to particular ministries “for
the equipment of his people for this total ministry” (id. 20). Scour
the annals of General Assembly back to 1972 as you may and you will
discover that with the exception of the reproduction of a Methodist
document in 1990, and apart from a few similarly general remarks
prefacing one or other of the several major piece of work that have
been produced which discuss mainly the work of the ordained ministry,
no attempt has been made to enlarge upon this initial paragraph. The
time has come to begin redressing that balance. As our Basis implies
ministry is first and foremost that which every single church member
is called to exercise. It is only when we all possess a clear
understanding of what that ministry encompasses that we shall get our
understanding of ordained ministry straight. This must therefore be
the starting point for any new pattern of ministry and the foundation
on which proposals for the future need to be built.
Let us start then by setting out what we may observe about who the
people are whom God calls to be members with us in his church, and
what is the basis and character of the ministry we share in common
with them.
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WHO ARE THE
PEOPLE OF GOD?
The first thing that strikes us is their enormous
diversity. They come from every condition of life:
• They belong to every stage of human life from the cradle to the
grave: there are the children to whom Jesus drew special attention
when he said that the kingdom of heaven belongs to them (cf. Mk 10
14); there are young people, full of the first excitement of
discovering the way of faith; there are adults, acquiring more
responsibilities as workers and parents; there are older people, for
whom the ability to contribute their memories and acquired experience
compensates for diminishing energy and strength.
• They include men and women who find themselves engaged at one level
or another in the whole range of human political, economic,
commercial, social and cultural life; their places range from the
chancelleries of government to the squalor where the most deprived
barely eke out an existence; and they belong to virtually every place
in between.
• They include not only those capable of communicating the healing
power of the gospel and being more generally at service to others, but
also those whose circumstances limit their capacity to help. The
gospel encourages us all to see those among the people of God who
experience suffering not simply as the objects of Christian charity
but as in themselves witnessing to the power of the suffering and
risen Christ.
• They exist as a community of men and women. They exercise their
calling in a wide variety of styles of family life. While the majority
see the lifelong marriage of one man to one woman as the norm, others
either choose or feel resigned to other possibilities; some find their
fulfilment in a commitment to one of the same sex; some choose a life
of celibacy, others, longing for the security of an extended family,
find themselves excluded from it.
• They find themselves part of a Christian family which includes
others from many distinct races and cultural backgrounds. Though they
may find security in being part of a world-wide confessional family
sharing a similar understanding of God’s purpose, they also find,
often within the same family or on their doorsteps, others whose
Christian tradition differs from and challenges their own, but whose
Christian integrity they cannot deny.
Reflecting on this diversity in the light of our understanding of the
Gospel and in particular of our experience of living together since
1972 in a united and uniting Church, it would seem that there are a
number of preliminary conclusions that can be drawn, conclusions
substantiated in the following pages.
• Each member is a unique and irreplaceable individual in whom the
risen Christ is to be encountered, with a totally distinctive ministry
to exercise on behalf of the whole, without which the whole people of
God is impoverished.
• Not every member, therefore, has one and the same ministry. There
will be a diversity of ministries which reflects that of the people of
God as a whole. The task of the church is to enable each member to
discover his or her distinctive contribution and develop it.
• In contrast to a world with its emphasis on meritocracy, there is a
particular responsibility laid on the church by the Gospel to attach
particular value to those generally regarded as weak or dishonourable
(cf. Luke 1 52f; I Cor. 12 22f).
• Diversity, such as that we have experienced, is not something to be
feared, but rather to be cherished as a gift of God, something which
reflects the very nature and purpose of God so long as it is held
together in the unity of love.
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WHAT THEN IS
THEIR MINISTRY?
The nature of the ministry to which the Lord
Jesus Christ calls his people must surely derive from the ministry he
himself exercised. This, in turn, may be seen to derive from what we
have come to know of the nature and purpose of God himself. God is
calling his people to continue the working out of that purpose which
finds its focus in Jesus. Now the diversity of the people of God, and
the varied dimensions of their ministry which have already been
noticed, are themselves reflections of the nature of God. What is
distinctive about our Christian experience of God is that the unity of
his being exists in the diversity of the Trinity. God whose nature is
love exists in the eternal loving community of Father, Son and Holy
Spirit, Creator, Mediator and Sanctifier.
• We experience him as a Creating God. The love of God is not a
narcissistic love confined to the unity of the Trinity; it is
essentially and necessarily an outgoing creative love. God’s nature is
such that he could not exist without a creation, a creation moreover
so made that it is capable of sharing in and responding to his love
and his creativity. The love of God needs to have as its object a
creature capable of and completely free to answer or spurn that love.
Such a creature is only possible as the product of the sort of
autonomously evolving world we have come to know ours to be. Our
experience, then, of a Creating God is of one who has made a humanity
to whose creativity he has dared to risk the very future of his
creation.
• We experience God as Mediator in Jesus of Nazareth, very man and
very God. In the midst of a world which was exhibiting all the
incipient signs of its own self-destruction, God’s continuing love for
his creation was made manifest within his creation itself in a person
fully sharing our human nature. In him he both furthers his work of
creation by working to transform our humanity, and acts to save it
from the forces of destruction, to mould it afresh into the image of
its creator. There was only one way of achieving this that was wholly
consistent with the autonomy of creation and the freedom of a
creature, that is by the loving self-emptying which finds its climax
in the Cross. There he inaugurates a new creation, what Jesus speaks
of as the Kingdom of God.
• We experience God, then, also as Sanctifying Spirit. It was the same
Spirit, already seen at work, according to Genesis, in creation, which
was recognised from the moment of his conception as the source of what
was unique in Jesus and which the community of faith arising from
Jesus’ resurrection experienced in the life of the church. Here was
the very power of God transforming believers, building them into the
community of love. This community, albeit not immune from human
failings and weaknesses, came none the less to be recognised as the
one, holy, catholic and apostolic church, partaking of the Kingdom,
indeed of the very nature of God in the unity of the trinity.
The ministry, then, to which God calls his people and for which the
outpouring of the Holy Spirit empowers them embraces not only their
life gathered together as a worshipping community but also their
obedient response to what God has done as they become involved in
exercising their creativity and in the conduct of temporal affairs.
Both corporately in the various councils of the church and
individually in the daily life of each of its members, they thereby
bear their witness to God’s purpose for the world revealed in Christ.
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THE MINISTRY OF
JESUS
That purpose, we have seen, finds its focus in
the ministry of Jesus and that ministry becomes therefore a model for
the ministry of the whole people of God. It is a ministry exercised in
a variety of dimensions. The traditional account of this
multi-dimensioned ministry speaks of Jesus as Prophet, Priest and
Shepherd/King. It was used by the Reformers to explicate the meaning
of the name Christ, i.e. the anointed one: these were the three
offices whose bearers were traditionally anointed. To-day it is rather
because we see Jesus in his earthly ministry fulfilling these three
roles that they remain valuable in demonstrating how our common
ministry derives from his.
• Jesus as prophet. It seems clear from numerous references in most of
the strands of gospel tradition that Jesus regarded himself as
representing the climax of the Old Testament prophetic tradition. They
present Jesus using both Elijah and Elisha as models for his own
activity (cf., e.g., Lk 4 25ff). What this meant for him was given
archetypal expression in the sermon which according to Luke he
preached in the synagogue at Nazareth (Lk 4 16ff). He read out the
passage in which Isaiah spoke of his prophetic vocation - bringing
good news to the poor, deliverance for prisoners, healing for the
sick, freedom for the oppressed, proclaiming “the year of the Lord’s
favour”. From that point onwards he went around those parts of Galilee
where such victims of an unjust society were most likely to be found,
everywhere bringing this same message of liberation. Jesus as prophet
proclaims in word and deed the present reality of God’s kingdom.
• Jesus as priest. In Old Testament tradition the people of Israel as
a whole was called to be a “a priestly kingdom and a holy nation” (Ex.
19 6). As such the people were called to act as a go-between between
God and the rest of his creation, representing the one to the other.
By the time of Jesus this role had been appropriated by a priestly
class, whose activity centred on the worship offered in the Temple of
Jerusalem which Herod had recently and lavishly rebuilt. Their
exercise of priesthood came into direct conflict with Jesus’ prophetic
ministry. So we have Jesus speaking of his own ministry as one which
would replace the Temple and its priestcraft. Henceforth Jesus’
ministry would be, as the letter to the Hebrews elaborates, that of
the great high priest, one who because he shares our human nature is
at the same time able to bridge the gulf in communication between God
and humanity.
• Jesus’ kingly role is one which he was careful to distinguish from
any earthly form of kingship (Jn 18 36). It is perhaps best to
approach this to-day by recalling that the imagery of a shepherd,
which Jesus was evidently so fond of using, was one which originally
referred to the exercise of kingship. Kings were called to act as
shepherds of God’s flock. All too often they ended up by feeding not
the flock but themselves (cf. Ezek. 34). Jesus in contrast was the
good shepherd (Jn 10 11) who lays down his life for the sheep. He was
the one who is grieved to see the people as sheep without a shepherd
(Mk 6 34) and takes on the role himself. Jesus’ kingly role is
therefore essentially a pastoral one. But at the same time his
pastoral vocation is kingly - it has to do with the re-ordering of
human life and society so that it may conform to the Kingdom his
coming inaugurates.
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A MINISTRY
IN THREE DIMENSIONS
It is time now to attempt to spell out the
implications of what has been said so far for the ways in which God’s
people are to-day called to exercise their ministry. Before doing so,
however, it would be well to pause to note the degree of real
correspondence that exists between what has been said about our
experience of the dimensions of God’s nature in trinity and the
dimensions of Jesus’ ministry:
• The Creator responsible for a world where humanity is made to share
in his creative purpose in Jesus rules his new creation in God’s
distinctive way.
• The Mediator God who in Jesus comes to share our humanity also
exercises in him a priestly, go-between, ministry.
• The same eternal Spirit, which was at work alike in creation and in
Jesus from the moment of his conception, motivates Jesus’ prophetic
ministry proclaiming good news.
We should not be surprised at these correspondences. They are rather
to be expected as reflecting the coherence with which God works out
his loving purpose. We should furthermore expect a similar coherence
in the way he chooses to continue the working out of that purpose in
the ministry to which he calls his people. Just as God’s nature as
love is mis-understood and distorted when it is not seen operating in
the unity and diversity of the trinity, and just as Jesus’ ministry
would be distorted if any one of the three emphases we have described
were absent or overlooked, so we should expect God’s people in all
their diversity to be called to a ministry of similarly varied
dimensions, held together in a unity of purpose. Alas, for all its
holy calling, the church remains a sinful human organisation as well,
which shares in our common human falling below God’s ideal; it remains
in constant need of reformation (semper reformanda). It is to that
re-shaping of our understanding and practice of ministry that we are
now being invited to address ourselves.
It is natural for Christians from the Reformed tradition to begin
their thinking about the ministry of the whole people of God by
referring to what has come to known as the priesthood of all
believers. Rightly understood, that refers to the corporate
participation of all the church in Jesus’ universal priestly ministry.
But it has not always been rightly understood among us, as the second
appendix to the 1995 URC report Patterns of Ministry pointed out.
There is no need or desire to go over again the ground covered there,
nor to add to or to take away from anything said there. What it seems
to be saying is that the people of God exercise their priestly
ministry when
• they meet together to hear and order their common life in obedience
to God’s word, living in Jesus the Christ and witnessed to in Holy
Scripture;
• they celebrate the gift of Holy Baptism by which God calls the
widest possible variety of persons, into membership of his church, and
the faithful respond to that call;
• they celebrate, thankfully (eucharistically), the sacrament of the
Lord’s Supper, whereby in the eating and drinking of bread and wine,
Christ repeatedly draws his people into communion with himself, and by
their sharing in it, he constitutes them as a sign of his kingdom of
justice love and peace;
• they become, therefore, for all of humanity to see, in their coming
together, in the participation in love and mutual respect of people
from all human types and conditions, a prototype of and model for what
God intends his creation to be like.
This understanding of the ministry of the whole people of God in terms
of the common priesthood of all believers falls short, however, when
it is seen as all that that ministry entails. In practice that is what
has all too often happened. Ministry has been seen exclusively in
terms of building up that community of faith, or of exercising one or
other of the many ministries devised to benefit that community. We
have too often succumbed to the temptation of becoming so devoted to
the life and tasks of the gathered church that we fall short in our
engagement to our responsibilities in the professional, social,
cultural and political world; and, in effect, create thereby a
separation of faith from life. That is why Christ’s priestly ministry
needed to be augmented by two other dimensions, prophetic and ruling,
which we should look for also in the ministry of the whole people of
God: the two arms, as Irenaeuas put it long ago, with which God in
Christ (in and through his body, the church) embraces the world he
loves.
Jesus’ prophetic ministry, we have seen, was exercised in word and in
action, proclaiming good news to the poor, and bringing release for
the world’s victims. The manner in which he exercised that ministry
(“The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve” (Mk 10 45)) was
that of a servant. The hallmark of the church’s prophetic ministry
from the earliest days of the church’s history came to be
characterised by servanthood (in Greek, diakonia), and those chiefly
engaged in its exercise became known as “deacons”. That this diakonia
had from the beginning a prophetic element become clear when we
remember that two of the first known “deacons” were Stephen and
Philip, ‘the Evangelist’, who, in their different ways exercised a
distinctively prophetic ministry. Service, and a commitment to the
needs of those for whom the ways of the world had no time, became the
mark by which the Christian community was recognised. Indeed by the
second and third centuries it was in many places operating the nearest
that the ancient world had then seen to a welfare state. To-day’s
world, no less, is still dominated by the powerful, the articulate and
the rich - and the laws and terms of trade which they establish
largely in their own interest. It still needs the challenge of the
prophetic/diaconal ministry of the people of God. We see them
exercising that ministry when
• they engage at every level of community life in the search for
justice on behalf of the world’s poor and those subject to
discrimination because of their race, age, gender or sexual
orientation;
• they enable those whom the world overlooks or devalues (e.g. the
physically and mentally handicapped) to achieve their potential;
• they engage in the relief of the suffering of the sick and,
especially, those victims of the world’s injustices;
• they commit themselves to fostering the widest range of educational
opportunities, spiritual as well as technical, for all peoples;
• and, in all this, enable others to see their engagement with the
world as bringing the good news of God’s salvation and encouraging
others to join them in their commitment.
Alongside this, if the people of God are to be faithful to the breadth
of Christ’s ministry, they will also seek to exercise a ministry that
extends his pastoral/royal function. That suggests that alongside
their priestly and diaconal ministries, the people of God also possess
a corporate ministry of oversight. The world we inhabit bears all too
many marks of the human potential for destruction - ethnic conflicts,
environmental crises, massive climate changes aggravated by the
wealthy’s misuse of creation and the poor’s determination not to be
left out - all, in their different ways, evidence of a shepherd-less
world, which has chosen to cut itself off from God’s kingly rule. The
temptation in all this for Christian people is to see all innovation
as potentially destructive, to shy away from anything that smacks of
usurping the power of God. But, as we have seen, God’s purpose is to
create a humanity which can share in his creativity. Humanity, then,
needs a people not reluctant to seek out God’s purpose and exercise
care of his creation and his creatures in his name. Clearly much of
the burden of this oversight will rest upon those members with
technical ability of one sort or another. However all its members and
all the world’s peoples live - or, we believe, should live - in a
democratic society, where political decisions are made corporately.
That points to the necessity for all the people of God to take up
their civic responsibilities to their fullest potential. So we see the
people of God exercising their ministry of oversight when
• each member is committed to expanding their personal capacity for
acting creatively - whether that means for them scientifically,
artistically, socially, in the creation of wealth or however;
• each member sees the exercise of his or her democratic
responsibility as an opportunity to engage in the working out of God’s
purpose, bringing judgements derived from their faith to bear upon
current affairs;
• they engage corporately at each and every level of society in a
critical involvement in its governance;
• they foster all those scientific developments which work for the
common good and challenge those working to its detriment.
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THE PEOPLE OF
GOD IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY.
In these first months of the twenty-first century
the changing context in which the people of God are being called to
exercise their ministry is being revealed with alarming rapidity. Here
are just a few of the signs of the times:
• The whole earth is being sucked, with seeming inevitability, into a
single global market, dominated by vast, economically powerful
conglomerates. Their dominance is increasingly rendering national
governments impotent and undermining the freedom and democracy they
claim to represent. Democratically responsible global institutions are
needed to provide the necessary checks and balances to their exercise
of power; they have yet to be put into place.
• One consequence of this global market is that everything is reduced
to what can be monetarily quantified. In the global market it is
assumed that the only efficient motivation is profit, rather than the
desire to serve the common good; in a world of contracted work, no
longer is there room for the professional/client relationship, only
for the provider and consumer of “services”.
• Another consequence is that human individuality is being stifled as
everyone is forced into being simultaneously producers and consumers
of these conglomerates’ products; as a result these two roles lead
each one of us into an as yet unreconciled conflict: as producers we
want shorter working hours and better conditions; as consumers we want
ever more choice (e.g. of schools for our children) and instant
satisfaction of our needs (e.g. health care on demand). It is this
conflict which gives rise to the growth around us of a blame culture,
in which, when our desires are not instantly satisfied, we seek
scapegoats and resort to litigation.
• A third consequence is that markets only serve to accentuate
existing differences. The gifted/rich/powerful take a firmer control,
the rest feel more and more excluded and powerless. We can observe
this growth of inequality happening both within and between nation
states with potential of doing devastating damage to the social
fabric.
• As yet our world remains unsure how to respond to these changes.
Individuals feel deep down that they are more than mere units, but
cannot see any means of escape. Are we entering a world against which
we can only rage (anti-globalisation riots; suicide missions &c)? Or
is globalisation essentially a fact of life, which human ingenuity is
free to develop for evil or for good?
• Where does religion belong in this world? Is it a hangover from a
more primitive world outlook, and the sooner it is discarded the
better? Religious communities have these days to justify their ability
to be capable of bringing about peace and reconciliation as well as
division and hatred. They face the temptation to reduce faith until it
becomes just another consumer choice: whether you are a Muslim or a
Methodist belongs to the same category as whether you drive an Escort
or an Astra.
As various church leaders in these islands have recently acknowledged,
the churches stand in danger of being marginalised so long as they are
constituted as they are. We are faced with the challenge of finding
new ways of being the church. We ought not to be surprised at this.
During the course of the church’s history the institutional framework
within which the people of God have exercised their ministry has been
influenced by the political shape of the world in which they have to
live. The early church took on its shape in response to the
fragmenting Roman Empire; the mediaeval church had to respond to
feudalism; in the post-Reformation period the church was shaped by the
Renaissance city and nation states; in the nineteenth century it
reflected the rivalries of the various world empires (British, German,
Russian &c). Sometimes in doing so it has been more successful than in
others in challenging the status quo and representing the kingdom of
God. It has to be acknowledged that the preponderance of imperial
imagery over the centuries has pre-disposed the church to see itself
primarily in hierarchical terms; hence the overwhelming concentration
which we noted earlier on the role of and dependence on the clergy,
something from which the United Reformed Church has not been totally
immune. The challenge of the twenty-first century is to return to our
sources, in the way we have attempted to do in this section, in order
to discover new, appropriate and effective ways of being the church
and, in particular, a new way for the people of God to exercise their
ministry, in the new world that we can see emerging. It is encouraging
to see that we are not alone in this quest. Pope John Paul’s 1988
Apostolic Exhortation Christifideles Laici is a notable statement of
the ministry of the whole people of God. There, however, the tension
between the approach being advocated and that church’s traditional
clergy-directed stance is palpable. For us in the Reformed tradition
there ought to be less of a problem.
Where we are being led is towards a model of the church as communion,
a distant echo of that perfection of communion which is the Trinity,
in which God relates to his world through the fragile human agency of
the man Jesus. The church is then essentially a community of
believers, its ministry that to which each individual, by virtue of
his or her baptism, is commissioned. The church exists, to be sure, as
a prototype of God’s new creation, but that existence also has to
reflect the fact that the primary object of God’s love is the world
not the church. Its members are built into a holy priesthood primarily
in order that they might engage in God’s mission in their lives from
day to day. Here then are some of the ways in which the model of the
church we are envisaging appears not only to be well adapted to the
mission God is calling his people to exercise in this new world but
also to sit comfortably within our Reformed tradition:
• In a world where individuals are confused by being at one and the
same time called to stand on their own and lose their individuality,
it will emphasise the distinctive calling of its members in all their
diversity to live and work together in search of the common good.
• In a world of contracts and blaming, it will emphasis the trust that
can exist between those drawn into communion with one another and
their God; believing that truth is less a possession to be defended,
more a gift of God to which all may aspire, it will eschew anything
that smacks of a heresy hunt as belonging more to an authoritarian
church than to the church as communion.
• In a world where democratic institutions are imperilled, it will
treasure its heritage of conciliarity, encourage every member to bear
his or her share of responsibility for its governance and see this as
a model for the wider world.
• In a world of global communications, it will not be afraid (as
Protestants have apparently been hitherto) to create trans-national,
indeed global, institutions to express God’s global concern; while at
the same time ensuring that each other manifestation of the church, at
nation, regional and local levels, is indeed an expression of that
same global concern.
Looking back on this account of the people of God and their ministry,
it becomes clear that a measure of repentance is in order. We must
however be clear and precise about what it is of which we need to
repent. There is no need to increase among our fellow church members
the guilty feeling that here is a calling which they are incapable of
fulfilling. Nor should we seek unnecessarily to add to their burdens.
On the contrary it a matter of acknowledging, affirming and supporting
what has perhaps not been sufficiently acknowledged in the past,
namely the countless ways in which the members of our church are
already sharing in this total ministry. However, in the past those of
us who as ministers or elders have been called to serve as leaders of
the church have, by the priorities we have set ourselves in the
church’s life and by our tacit acceptance of the more limited
expectations our fellow church members have sometimes had of us, left
largely unsupported and frustrated many who have been struggling to
maintain their witness at the cutting-edge of the church’s mission.
That neglect, wherever it exists, is something for which we all need
to repent. It is only as we engage together in the whole agenda we
have outlined that we are faithful to our common calling; to
over-emphasise one or other strand at the expense of the rest
seriously distorts the church’s nature and its message. We have
largely failed to equip God’s people with the confidence to engage in
their total ministry. For that, as our former general secretary has
written (Reform, October 2001), we need not so much more ministers,
but better ministers. How God is making provision for the equipping of
all his people for their total work of ministry in our rapidly
changing world is to be the subject of the remaining part of this
essay.
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EQUIPPING THE PEOPLE OF GOD.
THE GIFT OF
MINISTERS.
Alongside the ministry which God has committed to
every member of his people, it has been the church’s universal
experience almost from the very first that they need and God has given
the gift of ministers , those who constitute what is now known as the
ordained ministry. It is important to recognise, however, that like
all gifts of God this one comes in earthen, or at any rate human,
sometimes all too human, vessels. The manner in which the need has
been expressed and the gift received and institutionalised has varied
from time to time and place to place; the result is that the purposes
of God have been at all times more or less frustrated by human
perceptions of what that purpose is. Hence our conviction that the
church is semper reformanda.
In the very earliest communities of which we have any secure first
hand knowledge, those which were founded by St. Paul and were the
recipients of his letters, the emphasis is where we have sought to
place it in our previous section: less upon the gift of ministers,
more upon the great variety of charismata, spiritual gifts, with which
all those who make up the people of God are endowed. When conflicts
arose, and as the variety of those becoming members and of the social
situations that they had to face increased, Paul had to struggle to
exert his authority to maintain “the unity of the Spirit in the bond
of peace” (Eph. 4 2). Indeed, it is only in that post-Pauline letter
to the Ephesians that the emphasis begins to shift to the need for a
variety of ministries “to equip the saints for the work of ministry”
(loc. cit. v 12).
The impetus towards such a shift came from what was arguably the sole
organisational provision God made for the infant church - the gift of
apostles. The twelve who in Jesus’ lifetime were essentially his
disciples, pupils, and whom from an early stage he co-opted into his
mission, became increasingly to be seen as, in Greek, apostoloi. This
is an otherwise rarely used Greek word, which was probably employed to
suggest the first century Jewish institution of the shaliach, an
authorised representative of the community to whom a particular task
was committed (e.g. that given to Paul to harass Christians in
Damascus - Acts 9 1). In this sense the eleven, supplemented by
Matthias, were Christ’s representatives in the continuation of his
mission, their credibility linked to the fact that they were witnesses
of the resurrection. That the office of apostle was a special,
untransferable one is attested to, if only negatively, by the
difficulty Paul evidently had to achieve recognition for his personal
inclusion in their ranks by virtue of his special calling (I Cor. 15
8f).
In the first generation individual local churches looked to the
apostle to whom it owed its origin to provide the authority and
teaching to prevent it from straying from the unity of the Spirit.
With the dispersal and eventually the death of the apostles, a period
of uncertainty appears to have set in. In the following decades a
variety of seemingly experimental “ministries” arose, built upon these
apostolic foundations, designed to fill what was perceived as a vacuum
of leadership. The form these ministries took derived from the
patterns experienced in the differing environments in which the
communities lived. Thus the Jewish Christian communities adopted the
pattern of leadership offered by “elders” in the communities and
synagogues they knew, while it was in a Greco-Roman city, Philippi,
that we first hear of the church adopting the ministry of episkopoi.
It is perhaps misleading to translate this word as “bishops”, in view
of the subsequent overtones this word has acquired; in the Philippian
setting church members would have been made to think of the people
whom the civic authorities put in charge of specific projects,
“overseers” or “superintendents”. By the time of the Pastoral
Epistles, to Timothy and Titus, it would appear that there was
occurring a cross-fertilisation of these models, aimed at bringing
together the more rigid Jewish/Christian pattern and the more flexibly
“charismatic” approach of the Pauline communities.
It is in the letters of Ignatius of Antioch that these developments
are seen to have been crystallised into the pattern of a threefold
ministry of bishops, presbyters and deacons which has been widely
regarded as the churches’ norm. What has abiding importance here,
though, is less Ignatius’ particular identification of the bishop with
God the Father, the presbyters with the apostles and deacons with the
servanthood of Jesus; rather it is his general insight that this
variety of ministries reflects something of the nature of God and his
mission in our world. The particular hierarchical structure Ignatius
envisaged was typical of civil government in the Asia Minor in which
he ministered. Variations on the same three-fold pattern emerged
elsewhere, however, more participatory in Greece and in Rome (see,
e.g., the Letter of Clement), even less so in Egypt. In each case the
pattern adopted reflected, consciously or unconsciously, the character
of civil administration in that region; and changes in the pattern
that took place subsequently reflected civil administrative
developments. This parallelism can be viewed in a positive or negative
light. It can be seen as a slavish imitation of the world in which the
church’s ministry was being exercised; and this, obviously, was a
danger. But it can equally reflect a determination, as the churches
engage in their mission, to be relevant to the particular society in
which they exist and to endeavour thereby to transform that society.
In all this it is worth making two general observations. The first is
that there is nowhere any suggestion that the emergence of these
particular ministries had anything to do with the celebration of the
liturgy. Only with Ignatius do we encounter the idea of the bishop or
his delegate as president (see his letter To the Smyrnaeans, 8); they
arose out of the need of the people of God for leadership and
inspiration in their apostolic, missionary vocation. In them, it was
recognised, God was equipping his people for their ministry. The
second is that for the most part the bearers of the various offices
emerged from the communities themselves; there is no indication that
there existed any sort of pool of “ministers” to whom churches could
look for leadership. On the contrary, as the Didache informs us (para.
11ff), when outsiders turned up claiming to be “prophets” they were
looked upon with a degree of suspicion and are subjected to a severe
testing of their authenticity.
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MINISTERS
OF WORD AND SACRAMENT.
In the United Reformed Church, when we speak of
ministers we think first and foremost of those whom we call ministers
of word and sacrament. We need to recognise that as much as any other
this is a formulation derived from a particular time and place,
capable of giving expression to God’s purpose and mission, yet subject
like any other to the dangers of assimilation and of becoming
obsolete.
It is a formulation not to be found anywhere in the New Testament. Its
origin is in the period of the sixteenth century Protestant
Reformation in the city states of continental Europe. The churches
that sprang from that Reformation were presented with a problem by the
way in which the Roman Catholic Church, at the time of its so-called
Counter-Reformation, abrogated to itself the classic credal definition
of the church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic. An alternative had
to be found. That which gained general acceptance in Protestant
circles was the one coined in the Augsberg Confession (para 7), where
it is stated that “the one Holy Church ... is the congregation of the
saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the sacraments
rightly administered”.
From this starting point it seemed obvious to the Reformers that God’s
gift of ministers was to be discerned in those who rightly taught the
Gospel and rightly administered the sacraments. Thus Calvin, for
instance, envisaged four ministerial offices, pastors and teachers
concerned with the preaching and teaching of the Word, and elders and
deacons concerned with the government and care of the people. In the
course of time these coalesced into the pattern of ministries which
the United Reformed Church inherited, that of ministers of word and
sacrament and of elders or, as they had been known in the Presbyterian
tradition, respectively teaching and ruling elders.
In all this we need to note how, again consciously or unconsciously,
these developments reflected the bourgeois civic society of their
origin in Geneva, Amsterdam or Edinburgh. Councils of elders were the
counterpart of the city government of wealthy burghers, while the
freedom of pastors to proclaim the word was a reflection of the
autonomy of salaried academics in the Renaissance universities. This
is most clearly seen by us to-day in the inherited garb of ministers,
the black gown, with or without an academic hood, and bands, the dress
of a 16th century university man (sic!). Significantly it is mainly in
this same sort of environment to-day, among the more affluent burghers
in our urban and suburban communities, that this traditional pattern
of ministry retains a measure of viability. The question which our
churches have to face is whether, as this form of bourgeois society is
being overtaken by the processes of globalisation, this particular
pattern of ministry is not also becoming obsolete.
A NEW THREEFOLD
PATTERN?
During the final decades of the twentieth
century, after the publication in 1982 of the WCC Faith and Order
papers on Baptism Eucharist and Ministry, the Lima Report, an
ecumenical consensus was emerging to encourage those churches not
operating the three-fold pattern of bishops, presbyters and deacons to
consider doing so. Churches of the Reformed tradition such as the URC
have on the whole been resistant to this suggestion. It is worth
re-examining the reasons for this resistance and considering how
cogent they are.
In the first place the pattern is seen to introduce an inevitable
element of hierarchy into the life of the church which is at variance
with our reading of Scripture. On the other hand, what is emerging
from our discussion is that far from being at variance with scripture
the three-fold pattern is deeply rooted in the nature of God , in the
form of Jesus’ mission, and needs to be reflected in the ministry of
the whole people of God. It ought to cause us no surprise that as the
church reflected on God’s gift of ministers and settled into a
pattern, the pattern should have reflected these three particular
dimensions. Furthermore, as we have already noted, there was no
inevitability about the hierarchical element which did undoubtedly
enter in. Diversity does not necessarily imply hierarchy. So the
advocacy of a diversity of dimensions of ordained ministry to be found
in what follows is emphatically not at the same time the advocacy of a
hierarchy of ministries. All are of equal importance; each requires to
be balanced by the others. If necessary, conscious strategies will
need to be developed to make this clear.
It is then argued that in point of fact even those churches which pay
lip-service to a three-fold ministry has been able to live quite well
without this much diversity for much of their existence. Thus, for
instance, the diaconate has been widely reduced to a perfunctory
apprenticeship for future presbyters and bishops, its functions
largely taken over in the Middle Ages by the monasteries; and while
bishops have been free to enjoy the fruits of political power, they
have been largely absent from the daily lives of most ordinary
Christians, only appearing for the occasional service of confirmation.
The real question which this raises is whether this widespread failure
to attach value to the full range of diversity in God’s gift of
ministers has not been a cause of the church’s impoverishment in the
conduct of its mission, one which has opened the door to the very
abuses which we in the Reformed tradition are eager to point out.
At a deeper level there has been a fear that to embrace this threefold
pattern is also to embrace the implication maintained in the Western
Catholic tradition that the ministry committed to the whole people of
God is secondary to and dependent upon that of a ministry which is
derived separately from the apostles. On this theory without a bishop
ordained as a successor to the apostles there could be no ordained
presbyters and without an ordained presbyter there could be no
celebration of the sacraments; it is, therefore, on this basis that
the ministry is seen as constituting the church. This runs counter to
the experience of Protestants, who believe that the ministry entrusted
to them comes directly from their Lord, not mediated by a special
order of ministers. Protestants have therefore been driven to an
opposite extreme, maintaining that the authority of ministers derives
by delegation from the universal priesthood of all believers; that
ministers are, therefore, subject to and servants of the church,
called to do its bidding. This, however, is equally untrue to our
experience. Ministers, we have been saying, are a gift of God to the
church. The business of the church is not to decide who shall be its
ministers; it is to discern whom God is giving to it. We must then
speak of a dual dispensation; there is the ministry to which the whole
people of God are called, and there is the gift to the people of
ministers.
The crucial question therefore is the relationship between the parts
of this divine dispensation. What is the precise relationship of the
ministry of the whole people of God to the gift of ministers? The
virtue of the Lima Report is that it accurately sets these two poles
alongside each other. Where it is open to criticism is that it does
not adequately address the relationship of the one to the other. It is
to that that we must now turn.
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AN EQUIPPING
MINISTRY
There is an enormous range of possible
relationships between the ministry of the whole people of God and that
of ministers; some are derived from scripture, some from the tradition
of the church, some from the hopes and expectations of church members.
Ministers might be seen relating to the rest of the church as leaders,
pastors, teachers, midwives, nannies, a pioneer corps, as the focus
of, or representative of the whole church and so on. For all their
occasional usefulness, none of these analogies describes the specific
way is which the role of ministers differs from the more general
ministry as precisely as does the word used by the letter to the
Ephesians (4 12)Ministers are given to the church to equip the
people of God for the work of ministry.
To equip, says the Oxford Dictionary, is to supply what it needed for
action. Later in the same letter (6 11ff) the writer spells out the
particular spiritual gifts, “the whole armour of God”, which the
people of God need for their task and which, we may assume, God gives
ministers to provide. When we read of being equipped with the belt of
truth, the breastplate of righteousness and so forth, this clearly
chimes in with our Protestant experience of what ministers of the Word
and of the Sacraments have had to offer and confirms our traditional
understanding that constantly the church needs, and God indeed
provides for it, a ministry which is both spiritually mature and
possessed of the ability to communicate God’s eternal purpose in the
particular circumstances in which his people find themselves. What
that experience does not necessarily demonstrate is that the pattern
we have adopted, that of all-purpose, supposedly omni-competant
ministers, is best suited for equipping the church over the full range
of its mission. On the contrary, we have all too often seen it making
churches dependent upon their minister, its members paralysed from
engaging in mission, and ministers themselves, out of their sense of
indispensability, in effect conspiring with their members actually to
disable them for ministry.
It will be recalled that when we were describing the ministry of the
whole people of God we saw is to be possessed of three dimensions
derived from the offices of Jesus as servant/prophet, priest and
shepherd/king. It ought not therefore any longer come as a surprise to
us that the form in which this ministry has been received by much of
the church over many centuries has corresponded to these three
dimensions. God provides deacons to equip the people for what we have
described as their prophetic servanthood; presbyters for their
universal priesthood and, for their ministry of oversight, those who
have traditionally been called bishops. In the following section I
want to show how, over recent years, the work of the Holy Spirit may
be discerned preparing the ground in the United Reformed Church for
the development of such a diversity of ministries and how things might
develop.
First, though, a note on the meaning of the word ordination. It has
been the custom to speak of those whom we have described as an
equipping ministry as the “ordained” ministry, presumably because they
are seen as belonging to a particular order of ministers. The practice
of the United Reformed Church has been to ordain both stipendiary and
non-stipendiary ministers of word and sacrament. It has also ordained
elders, though the rationale for this has been questioned. One reason
for this questioning is that there are any number of other servants of
the church, for instance Church Related Community Workers, who might
arguably be candidates for ordination. The understanding of the gift
of ministers which is being set forth here suggests a basis for
ordination which might go a considerable way towards resolving this
uncertainty. It is being suggested that the rite by which each church
member enters upon his/her part in the ministry of the whole people of
God is baptism, with the service of confirmation becoming a (perhaps
repeatable) act by which the church opens itself to the empowering
gift of the Holy Spirit as individuals enter, during the course of
life’s journey, on successive stages of their ministry, and are
inducted into ministries which are respectively diaconal, priestly or
having a dimension of the oversight of God’s creation. Ordained
ministers, on the other hand, are those recognised, authorised and
received by the church as a whole as a gift of God to equip their
fellow members for the specific dimensions of their ministry. The
following criteria for ordination might therefore be employed:
• Is the ministry to which a candidate is called one which is clearly
seen as equipping God’s people for one or other of the dimensions of
its ministry?
• Does a candidate believe him/herself to be called by God to that
ministry, has (s)he the necessary spiritual and intellectual gifts and
is that particular ministry received by the church as a whole as a
gift from God to his church, with the implication that there is a
life-long commitment, both by the individual and the church as a
whole, to that ministry?
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EXPECTATIONS
It would be most helpful to see the change which
the United Reformed Church is facing in its practice of ministry as a
response not so much to a sense of crisis as to a ferment of
experimentation already taking place within the life of the church.
Much of this experimentation cannot easily be accommodated within our
existing structures and ways of thinking and behaving, but some at
least of it may well be inspired by the Holy Spirit. The present
author does not claim to be aware of all the good things that are
happening. What he believes has been provided in the foregoing pages
is a framework for channelling that experimentation and criteria for
assessing its validity. Here are some developments which it is
possible to envisage taking place in the near future which would be
consonant with the principles here being enunciated:
1. The people of God, it has been said above, is principally
exercising their universal priesthood when their meeting together as a
congregation in obedience to God’s word and to celebrate the
sacraments becomes a sign and a foretaste of God’s Kingdom. It is the
ministry of presbyters which facilitates this priesthood. The
congregations of the URC have traditionally looked to ministers of
word and sacrament for this service. They still look to the presence
in their midst of a full-time minister as their ideal, however
unviable that provision might presently be. As a result the
traditional understanding that presbyteral ministry is related to one
local church and one only has had to be compromised as ministers are
being called to the charge of group pastorates comprising an ever
increasing number of churches, often related to communities quite
distant from one another. It is to be expected, then, that in the
future churches must look chiefly to the eldership instead for
presbyteral ministry. (‘Elder’, after all, is only an Anglicised form
of an original Greek word from which ‘presbyter’ is derived).
In spite of decades of attempts at training elders, the majority of
our elders still think of themselves fulfilling a similar role to the
(parochial) church councillors of other denominations and many LEPs.
However the responsibilities laid upon them by our basis of union are
virtually identical with those of ministers of word and sacraments,
with the exception that they are not normally called to pastoral
charge of congregations. To be sure congregations will continue to
need local church councillors. Increasingly, though, they are looking
for more leadership from within their own ranks; recently General
Assembly has sanctioned experiments in Local Church Leadership based
on the eldership. It is to be expected, then, that we should move to a
situation in which only those actually equipped for and called to
undertake this sort of leadership (which will include presidency at
the sacraments) should be ordained to the eldership/presbyterate; and
that there should be such a leadership group in each congregation.
Such a move is not as innovative as it may seem; it is essentially a
move towards the recovery of the form of eldership we inherited from
the Churches of Christ, and which was subsumed in the early 1980s into
the Auxiliary Ministry. It would, moreover, go some way towards
meeting the difficulties over the URC’s present practice of eldership
referred to recently in the report of the tripartite conversations,
Conversations on the way to unity, 1999-2001, paras. 40ff. The sooner
this shift in emphasis became general the sooner would we be in a
position to shift resources to equipping the church for other, equally
mission-oriented dimensions of its ministry.
2. Some years ago a limited number of Church Related Community Workers
were admitted to the church’s payroll. A recent review of their work
suggested that this number should be increased. If they are perceived
not simply as being delegated by the church to act on its behalf, but
rather by virtue of their training and experience to liberate
congregations and communities as a whole in working towards a more
just society, then clearly they are exercising what we would mean by
an ordained diaconal ministry. However, they are not the only ones so
doing. For example, those NSMs whom we now call ‘ministers in secular
employment’, if they are in some way pioneering the mission of their
fellow employees (and if they are not, should they have been
ordained?) are engaged in such a ministry. So perhaps is the ministry
of chaplains in colleges and hospitals and industrial chaplains. Then
those engaged in stewarding and administering the church’s resources,
thereby setting an example of how the world’s resources should be
stewarded, are also engaged in such a ministry. A recent report to
Mission Council suggested that there were dangers as well as
advantages in the introduction of a diaconate into the life of the
URC. If it is seen as not a piece-meal change for change’s sake, but
as part of a coherent strategy for equipping the people of God in
their service of the poor and their quest for justice, the case for
its introduction can be made out.
3. Some of those who hitherto have believed themselves called to the
ministry of word and sacraments may find themselves more suited to
this diaconal ministry. A few of our present ministers of word and
sacrament will continue to serve the small minority of our larger
congregations who will be able to support a full-time leader of their
team of presbyter/elders. Rather more will look to fulfil this role in
a part-time capacity. Increasingly, however, it can be envisaged that
our stipendiary ministers will be called to exercise an oversight
ministry. Hitherto discussion about an oversight ministry among us has
centred on the role of moderators - so subversive has the influence of
the Anglican/Catholic model of episcopacy been upon us. When in the
previous section we were thinking of the ministry of oversight to
which the whole people of God are called, something much less limited
was beginning to emerge: it is about nothing less that the taking up
of our share in our God-given responsibility for the welfare and
direction of his whole creation. For the majority of us this will mean
having a global vision to inform our activity in the place where we
live and work. The role of ministers of oversight is to equip and
enable the people of God for this awesome task.
When they were first appointed, what we now call Synod Moderators were
intended chiefly to give pastoral care to ministers and to facilitate
their movement from pastorate to pastorate. Increasingly in recent
years we have been looking to them, in collegiality with leaders of
other churches, to provide a more general oversight ministry in the
areas of their Synods. Simultaneously however we have become aware
that those areas are too large for them to be effective in this way on
their own. We have seen more and more stipendiary ministers appointed
- sometimes on a full-time basis, sometimes in conjunction with a
pastorate - to share this burden with them: as ecumenical officers,
mission/evangelism enablers, training officers and so on. Increasingly
we find ministers experiencing a tension between the expectations of
the members of their congregations and their sense of responsibility
to lead their people in a concern for the welfare of the wider
community. This tension is inevitable so long as we blur the
distinction between the calling of presbyteral, diaconal and oversight
ministers.
Our experience of the ministry of Synod Moderators, including the
developments and extensions of that ministry just noted, suggests that
churches of our tradition have been led to augment their traditional
understanding of the nature of oversight in the church (in Greek,
episkopé ). Traditionally oversight has been exercised collegially by
the various Councils of the church. Now they recognise that this can
appropriately be complemented by the personal oversight of
specifically called ministers. It is to be expected that we shall move
towards seeing the basic unit in the URC as a cluster of churches,
somewhat smaller in number than most of the existing District
Councils, their size largely determined by the socio-geographical
nature of the community to which they are called to relate. Each will
be served by a number of deacons, elder/presbyters in each
congregation and one or more oversight ministers. By the very nature
of their world-oriented ministry, these latter will see themselves
working in ever closer collegiality with similar ministers of other
churches and working towards the creation of authoritative ecumenical
conciliar bodies. Simultaneously, with the development and growth of
civil government in our regions, we may envisage a convergence of our
wider bodies within these regions, and the emergence of regional
councils served by oversight ministers working in partnership with
their ecumenical counter-parts. Likewise at a national level. In this
way it will become clear that there is need at each level for a
partnership between conciliar and personal instruments of oversight;
and that there is no essential difference - something thats the
Reformed tradition has traditionally and importantly maintained -
between the calling of oversight ministers at local, regional and
national levels.
Given the shift of resources from presbyteral ministry which we are
envisaging, we can see it becoming economically possible for there to
be within the area of, say, each parliamentary constituency a
full-time URC minister joining with equivalent ministers of other
churches in that area to lead the people of God in its mission, being
responsible among other things for training/ equipping the saints for
their part in it. Once again this is not something entirely foreign to
our experience: were not those who in the former Churches of Christ
were known as General Ministers exercising very much this style of
ministry?
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IN AN ECUMENICAL
CONTEXT
From its inauguration the United Reformed Church
has seen itself not simply as a united but also as a uniting church.
It is important that when it engages in making changes to its current
practice it should be both sensitive to the experience of its
ecumenical partners and be clear on how these changes might play a
constructive part in ongoing ecumenical discussions regarding the
nature of the church and its mission. Here then in conclusion are a
few observations which seek to relate the pattern of ministry
envisaged to the wider ecumenical picture.
1. The question will inevitably be raised as to how what it being
envisaged differs from what happens in Methodist churches. Is it not
simply the adoption of that church’s practice, where the basic unit
for the deployment and employment of ministers of word and sacrament
is the circuit? To be sure, there is already a widespread recognition
in the URC that for their effective deployment, ministers need to be
seen as primarily responsible to their District Council, and that
therefore their sphere of ministry (“scoping”) should always be
subject to its review. It follows from this that the call to a
stipendiary minister should be issued not by a local congregation but
by the District Council. (This has, interestingly, always been the
case in respect of non-stipendiary ministers). Is this not simply the
adoption by the URC of Methodist circuits? To some extent it is not
surprising that, given the extent of local co-operation between
Methodist and U.R. Churches, we should see the URC learning from
Methodist experience. But the learning needs to be mutual.
An essential component of what is being suggested above is that the
ministers of oversight being proposed are complemented in each local
congregation by elder/presbyters. Thereby what may be seen as one of
the weaknesses of Methodist practice is being addressed. The principal
complement to ministers of word and sacrament in Methodism is the
local preacher. Local preachers, like ministers, relate principally to
the Circuit, and are “planned”, usually by the Superintendent
Minister, to take particular services in local congregations. Their
usefulness and acceptability is limited by the extent to which they
are aware of and sensitive to the situation and needs of particular
congregations. Thus in Methodism the main opportunity for “lay”
ministry is in the taking of services without any necessary direct
involvement with the life and governance of the congregations
involved. With the decreasing ratio of ministers to local
congregations Methodism, like the URC, is becoming more and more
dependent upon local/lay preachers. What is here being envisaged is a
move from the present more or less casual relationship, in both our
churches, of occasional preachers to congregations, to a system where
the leadership of local congregations, including the leadership of
worship - in word and sacraments - is in the hands of ordained
elder/presbyters drawn from its own ranks who in partnership with
oversight ministers are therefore intimately involved in the life of
that congregation. It is suggested that here is an important
contribution which we might have to offer to Methodism and the wider
church in general.
2. It is worth noting the extent to which each of the present varied
understandings of the nature of ministry current on the ecumenical
scene lead to difficulties in providing local congregations with
sacramental leadership - not least in the so-called episcopally-led
churches. A glance at the pages of those newspapers which still
occasionally print a list of ecclesiastical appointments, with the
long and often mellifluous list of village names that comprise an
incumbent’s pastorate, is a reminder that to-day many an Anglican
parish priest has oversight of an area which is comparable to a
diocese in, say, the North Africa of the time of St. Augustine. In the
Church of England this is increasingly a problem being resolved by the
appointment of non-stipendiary priests. Equally the Roman Catholic
Church is experiencing it own peculiar difficulties in sustaining its
all-male, celibate priesthood.
This leads us to reflect on the implications of what is here being
suggested for the traditional understanding of the nature of Christian
oversight. The position of the United Reformed Church in common with
other churches of the Reformed tradition has traditionally had two
broad planks. The first, mentioned above, is that the exercise of
oversight among us is primarily through the councils of the church.
The second is that the functions which in other churches are ascribed
to bishops - they are the chief pastors of a local church; they link
the local church to the universal church; they are guardians of the
apostolic faith in a local church - have been for us exercised by
ministers of word and sacrament: they are our bishops; the essential
difference is that whereas other churches see the basic unit of the
local church as the diocese for us it is the gathered congregation.
What is being envisaged here is that those whom we have known as
ministers of word and sacrament will exercise an oversight ministry.
This raises the question whether, in traditional terms, the
relationship of the full-time incumbents to these extended Anglican
parishes is not more accurately seen as episcopal rather than
presbyteral; and whether there too that relationship might not
beneficially be augmented by the introduction of the sort of
elder/presbyters here being advocated. By virtue of their presbyteral
ordination, they might be seen as acceptable presidents at
celebrations of the sacraments. At the same time the office of bishop
would be more explicitly brought closer to the life of local
congregations than is currently the case in episcopally-led churches.
3. In the foregoing pages there has been occasion from time to time to
emphasise the global context in which ministry is to-day to be
exercised. To take this to heart would involve something of a
sea-change for churches of the Reformed tradition. It is not being
suggested that there has been a lack of global commitment, either
among individual ministers or church members; indeed they have often
been in the forefront of bringing this perspective to local attention.
The sea-change needed lies at the structural level. Hitherto Reformed
Churches have not generally been accustomed to invest any degree of
authority to councils wider than the boundaries of a nation state. A
reason for this is doubtless attributable to a Protestant fear of the
degree of authority, and freedom of action, accorded by the Roman
Catholic Church to the Pope (not to mention his curial court) in Rome.
To-day we are witnessing the increasing importance of trans-national
institutions like the European Union. Like all human achievements
these are capable of being forces for good or for evil. A mature
Christian response is surely not to run away from such developments
for fear of their capacity to ride rough-shod over human diversity.
Rather it is to use any influence available to us to make them more
democratically responsible bastions against the sort of globalisation
which in the interests of multi-national business exploits the weak
and destroys the environment. If such is a genuine part of the calling
of the whole people of God, then it will need authoritative
trans-national councils to facilitate this ministry. Who, then, is to
deny the possibility that God is seeking to give to such a church
ministers of oversight with a trans-national remit? And, ultimately, a
form of papacy with which Reformed churches might feel comfortable, an
appropriate ministry with a fully global dimension?
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