Uppsala Conference – St Michael’s College
25th March 2014
I want to start with a modern parable which some of you may have heard before.
“On a dangerous seacoast, where shipwrecks often occur, there was once a crude little lifesaving station. The building was just a hut, and there was only one boat, but the few devoted members kept a constant watch over the sea, and with no thought for themselves went out day and night tirelessly searching for the lost. Many lives were saved by this wonderful little station, so that it became famous. Some of those who were saved, and various others in the surrounding area, wanted to become associated with the station and give of their time and money and effort for the support of its work. New boats were bought and new crews trained. The little lifesaving station grew.
Some of the members of the lifesaving station were unhappy that the building was so crude and poorly equipped. They felt that a more comfortable place should be provided as the first refuge of those saved from the sea. So they replaced the emergency cots with beds and put better furniture in the enlarged building. Now the lifesaving station became a popular gathering place for its members, and they decorated it beautifully and furnished it exquisitely, because they used it as a sort of club. Fewer members were now interested in going to sea on lifesaving missions, so they hired lifeboat crews to do this work. The lifesaving motif still prevailed in the club’s decoration, and there was a liturgical lifeboat in the room where the club initiations were held. About this time a large ship was wrecked off the coast, and the hired crews brought in boatloads of cold, wet and half-drowned people. They were dirty and sick, and some of them had black skin and some had yellow skin. The beautiful new club was in chaos. So the property committee immediately had a shower house built outside the club where victims of shipwreck could be cleaned up before coming inside.
At the next meeting, there was a split in the club membership. Most of the members wanted to stop the club’s lifesaving activities as being unpleasant and a hindrance to the normal social life of the club. Some members insisted upon lifesaving as their primary purpose and pointed out that they were still called a lifesaving station. But they were finally voted down and told that if they wanted to save the lives of all the various kinds of people who were shipwrecked in those waters, they could begin their own lifesaving station down the coast. They did.
As the years went by, the new station experienced the same changes that had occurred in the old. It evolved into a club and yet another lifesaving station was founded. History continued to repeat itself, and if you visit that seacoast today, you will find a number of exclusive clubs along that shore. Shipwrecks are frequent in those waters, but most of the people drown!”
Now, you can draw any number of points from that parable, but for the purposes of this lecture, there are two themes which I will return to again and again, though not necessarily in the order in which I give them now.
1.First – that a lifeboat station exists to save lives. By the same token the Church of God exists to worship God and serve His world. It is the only organisation that exists for the sake of those who do not belong to it. It is, however, easy for the Church, just like this lifeboat station, to forget what its main purpose is and to become totally self-absorbed.
2.Secondly, all the members were initially involved in life saving but soon they began to employ a lifeboat crew to do that work for them. I want to argue in this lecture that every baptised member of the Church has a part to play in the Mission of God to His world, but in a church which has a stipendiary clergy, it is easy to think that the responsibility for such a mission and ministry is theirs and theirs alone.
As Prof Dan Hardy puts it “there has been a tendency to suppose that the Church is centred in the priest. Clergy have been seen as a kind of religious aristocracy whose very presence was the church”. The result then is, as he goes on to argue, that the task of ministry which belongs to all God’s people becomes restricted to those who are ordained.
In Wales, it finds its fullest expression in the work of Charles Green who was hugely influential as Archbishop of Wales (and successively Bishop of Monmouth and Bangor) in the drafting of the Constitution of the Church in Wales. He also wrote a commentary on that Constitution. Green’s views and theology have had a profound effect on the way ministry is exercised in the Church in Wales. For Green, the bishops and clergy were the chief representatives of the risen Christ and the former were successors to the apostles and source of all other ministry in the church. Thus the first two chapters of his commentary are on the episcopate, the third is on what he terms “The Subordinate Ministries” and it is only when we get to Chapter 4 that mention is made of the laity.
In a book containing 15 chapters and 318 pages Green devotes 5 chapters and 105 of those pages to bishops. Green saw the apostles as future rulers of Jesus’ messianic kingdom and their authority was passed on to the bishops so that “plenitude of apostolic authority and power is found vested in the bishop.” This meant for Green that, wherever the bishop was, there was the church and he was the controller of presbyters, deacons and laity. “The Bishop is by divine commission the Chief dispenser of the Word of God and His Holy Sacraments, and administrator of the Discipline of Christ”. “The totality of the Christian Ministry stands in the Bishop alone: he sums up all subordinate ministries in his own ministry…. The Bishop is the sole source of Mission and Jurisdiction within his diocese”. “In a word, all ministrations, clerical or lay, in the church derive their validity from the Bishop, in whom is vested the plenitude of Apostolic authority and power”.
To sum up, for Green, the matter was simple: Jesus had founded his church by calling the apostolic band, and the bishops were their direct descendants. Without the bishop there would be no church. It is a view that can be traced back to St Ignatius of Antioch, and a view that ignores St Jerome who saw the bishop as just the head of a college of priests in a diocese – a primus inter pares.
His view of ordained ministry is that it is superior to and set over against the ministry of the laity and that the work of mission and pastoral care belong to the clergy. Ordained ministers were for him mediators of Christ and rulers on his behalf. The church existed as a community gathered around its divinely appointed ordained ministry. The function of the clergy was to offer ministry to the faithful and to any one else who needed it. The role of the laity was to receive it. It is a theology that has left a deep mark on how the Church in Wales has viewed its mission and ministry.
Although Green says that admission into the fellowship of Christ’s Church is through baptism, for it was by baptism that Jesus entered upon his Mission as Messiah and by baptism that his followers are made Christian, his ecclesiology fails to take its significance seriously. There is very little in Green about being ‘in Christ’ by virtue of baptism, and, although the laity have their part to play within the councils of the church, that is only possible because the bishops have allowed them such a role, for the bishops “normally consulted their presbyters, and in varying modes co-operated with the laity.” Although he mentions their role as bearing witness, on the whole the theology and ecclesiology adumbrated is of ministry that essentially belongs to the ordained, who are especially called and commissioned to it.
There seems little mention in Green of the Pauline image of the Church as the Body of Christ or indeed of the coming of the Spirit on all God’s people at Pentecost. In the Old Testament the Spirit of God was only given to special people – those who were priests, prophets or kings. In the New Testament, on the other hand, on the day of Pentecost the Spirit was poured out on all God’s people – on all believers. So, as St Paul puts it in I Corinthians 12 and Romans 12, “all God’s people make up the body of Christ” and each part of the body has his or her own particular function to perform. Each member has been given gifts which are used not for his or her own use but to build up the body of Christ. These gifts have been given either through the Spirit at Pentecost or by the Spirit of God at baptism. The implication therefore seems clear – that every member of the body has a part to play in the mission of Jesus and this has been given not by the apostles but directly through the spirit or through baptism. In and through baptism all God’s people are ministers of the Gospel.
The theologian Miroslav Volf, Professor of Systematic Theology in California, in his book “After our Likeness” sums up the position when he says that the “Church is God’s new creation, grounded in the coming of the kingdom of God in the person of Jesus. It is the place where God dwells.” The presence of Jesus is therefore mediated not just through ordained people but through the whole people of God. It is he who gives gifts to his people.
Moreover the New Testament regards calling or vocation as something that happens to all Christians. Many people, when they speak of people who are called by God to serve Him, automatically have in mind the ordained ministry. But the word ‘vocare’ occurs only once in the Bible: “walk worthy of the vocation set by God when he called you” (Ephesians 41). In the New Testament when someone is called, it is not to ministry or priesthood or any ministerial office but to be a Christian. That’s how the New Testament understands the divine call.
The Greek word for church is ‘ecclesia’ which means ‘called out ones’. The difference between the church and other organisations is that it is not something that is created by human enterprise or designed to serve human ends but a gathering of people called out to be something and to do something. The summons, the vocation comes from outside them – it comes from God. The divine call then, as far as the New Testament is concerned, is addressed to ordinary men and women that they might become disciples of Jesus. The call is to the acceptance of new life in Christ Jesus.
St Paul always links vocation with a person’s call to become a Christian, eg I Corinthians 12“God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of His Son Jesus Christ”. Everyone who is a Christian has been called by God. Calling and ministry belong to all God’s people. Vocation or calling is God’s initiative in summoning human beings to be conformed to the image of his Son. It is giving God his due in all aspects of daily life - “let everyone lead the life which the Lord has assigned to him and in which God has called him”. (I Corinthians 717). All God’s people are called to follow him, whatever they do and wherever they are.
Christian faith is about attempting to live God’s life in the world (I John 314-18). Each person has some gift to offer. On this reading the laity are not passive recipients of the ministry of the clergy but together they minister to God’s world. Baptism not ordination is the primary sacrament. Paul constantly reminds his readers of the significance of baptism, e.g. in Romans 63-11, I Corinthians 1213, Galatians 327-29. Through baptism people have been born anew and this affects every aspect of their lives. In and through baptism people have died with Christ and have been raised to new life in him. Baptism is a commissioning for discipleship in the congregation and for mission in the world.
Martin Luther, picking up on this point said that he had been made a priest at his baptism and a minister at his ordination. Here of course Luther was echoing the first Epistle of Peter chapter 2, where all God’s people are called a royal priesthood.
Where then do we go from here? There seem to be two diametrically opposed theologies. The one vests mission and ministry solely in the hands of those who are ordained; the other views ministry as the work of every baptised Christian. As a result of these two opposing view points lay people have felt that clergy have denied them a ministry which is rightly and properly theirs through baptism and clergy have felt that, if lay people begin to exercise ministry traditionally reserved for the ordained, then what will be left for them to do? They also complain that the laity do not always want to exercise such ministry. All of this against a background of a sharp decline in church going, a sharp fall in those offering themselves for the ordained ministry and an increasingly difficult financial era for the church.
It also reflects two different kinds of ecclesiologies. One view is that the bishop ensures the presence of Christ because of the apostolic succession and his communion with other bishops and so it is the bishop who ensures the ecclesiality of the church. The other ecclesiology stresses the church as an assembly gathered in the name of Jesus defined by the history of Jesus. Christ is present through his Spirit where people gather in His name, are baptised and profess faith in Him – that is what makes the church a church. Christ is present “not through the narrow portals of ordained office, but through the dynamic life of the entire church. The church is constituted by all who assemble in the name of Christ in order to profess faith in Him as Saviour and Lord”.
Whilst it may no longer be either possible or desirable to view matters in the way Archbishop Green did (incidentally modern scholarship has shown that Green’s theology of apostolic succession is flawed and that it cannot be proved in every particular instance that the apostles were responsible for the succession of Bishops in each place or indeed that there is a single view of ordained ministry in the New Testament), nevertheless as we begin to think of how to view ministry at the beginning of the third millennium it may be possible to hold both a high view of the place of ordained ministry as well as emphasising the crucial and fundamental ministry of God’s people called to it by virtue of baptism. This could revolutionise our view both of mission and ministry. As I have tried to indicate, this is fundamentally a theological matter but God often forces us to examine our basic theological premises at times of crises, financial or otherwise in the life of a church.
In recent years a great deal of theological work has been done on the place of the laity in the Church – the ministry of the whole people of God, both by eminent theologians and by various bodies such as the World Council of Churches in the Lima Report “Baptism, Ministry and the Eucharist”. Thus the Lima Report stresses the calling of the whole people of God and places the role of the ordained firmly in that context. The ordained ministry can only be rightly understood within the broader context of the various spirit-gifted activities within the church.
The ordination service of the Church in Wales holds a view of ministry similar to the one adumbrated by the Lima Report. The bishop’s charge explicitly says that “all baptised persons are called to make Jesus Christ known to men as Saviour and Lord, and to be fellow workers with him in his renewing of the world”, yet that has not prevented us as a church from regarding ministry as essentially a clerical prerogative, in spite of the fact that the ordination charge places the ordained ministry in its proper ecclesiological context and sees all ministry as a continuation of Christ’s ministry in the Church and ordained ministry as part of the corporate ministry of that whole church. It is meant to be a collaborative ministry. Moreover this ministry exists according to the ordinal to serve the world. It is because of one’s baptism that this ministry is to be exercised, for it is baptism that commissions Christians to work for God’s mission. As the Church in Wales Catechism puts it “The Church carries out its mission through the ministry of all its members”. The Church in Wales has found it possible at one and the same time to arrive at a new understanding of the role of the laity whilst in practice continuing the old model of ministry being the prerogative of the clergy alone.