Commissioning

Principle

Commissioning is the church’s sending. In it the church recognizes that God has called a person, prays for the Holy Spirit to empower them, and sends them into ministry for a season of formation and testing before ordination.

Background

¶ 325 says that commissioning “publicly acknowledges God’s call and the response, talents, gifts, and training of the candidate.” That is true and it is thin, and it leaves two obvious questions unanswered. If commissioning acknowledges God’s call, what did licensing acknowledge? And if ordination also recognizes God’s call, what does ordination add?

Our Ordinal answers better than our Discipline, and it answers with a text.

“Commissioning may be compared to the experience of the early church in Antioch when the Holy Spirit instructed the community to ‘set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them’ (Acts 13:2).”

In Antioch there are prophets and teachers at worship, and the Spirit speaks. Barnabas and Saul are already called; the Spirit says so in the past tense, “the work to which I have called them.” The community fasts, prays, lays hands on them, and sends them off. That laying on of hands is not ordination. Paul does not date his apostleship from it, and the church has never read it as the origin of his ministry. It is a sending, by a congregation, of people God had already called, into work God had already assigned.

That is a real and distinct act, and it is what our rite performs. The bishop lays both hands on each candidate’s shoulders and prays, “Pour out your Holy Spirit upon Full Name. Send him now to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ, to announce the reign of God, and to equip the church for ministry.” There is an invocation of the Spirit and there is a laying on of hands, and there is a specific and careful withholding: “No stole or other instruments of office are given to commissioned ministers.”

The Ordinal’s own summary of what commissioning does runs to five clauses. It “acknowledges and affirms God’s call and the candidates’ response, gifts, abilities, and training”; it “invokes God’s grace for true service”; it credentials them to lead; it “calls candidates to enter a time of evaluation of their effectiveness”; and it offers them the annual conference’s support. And it says that commissioning “has implied that the person is being sent for service and the church invokes the Holy Spirit to empower commissioned ministers during their time of provisional membership.”

So the church already has the theology of commissioning that ¶ 325 does not state. It is the provisional sending of the called: real divine action invoked, real authority given, and the signs of an order deliberately withheld because the question of the order is not yet settled.

The rite also grounds it where this document has grounded everything. It opens by reminding the congregation that “by affirming the covenant of baptism, all members of Christ’s holy church pledge to serve as Christ’s representatives in the world,” and it puts the prophet’s words in the candidates’ mouths: they come “ready to respond generously to the Lord in the words of the prophet: ‘Here I am; send me.’” That is Isaiah 6, the same call narrative in which the coal is laid on the unclean lips before the sending. The rite has understood exactly what it is doing.

Commissioning as we practice it is a biblical distinction without a historic match in other traditions, and the document should say so before a reader discovers it. The Antioch pattern is genuinely there in Scripture. But no major communion has a permanent order or rite called commissioning that sits where ours sits, between licensing and ordination. The nearest analogue elsewhere is the transitional diaconate, in which a person is ordained deacon on the way to priesthood, and that is not the same thing: it is ordination, and ours deliberately is not. When we commend commissioning ecumenically we should say what it is, a Methodist arrangement with a scriptural warrant and no direct parallel, rather than implying an ancient pedigree it does not have. This document has criticized the church for using words like apostolic warmly and vaguely. The same discipline applies to our own good ideas.

Two further difficulties belong on the record.

The first is that commissioning’s meaning depends entirely on what follows it, and for many it now leads nowhere in particular. The provisional relationship is meant to be a season. But ¶ 327.7 provides that provisional members “may not be retired” and that those reaching mandatory retirement age “shall be automatically discontinued,” though they may then be classified as retired local pastors. A relationship that cannot end in retirement and can end in automatic discontinuance is not a season of formation. It is a holding pattern with a cliff at the end.

A smaller provision shows the same shape and is worth having in view, because it is easy to get half right. Commissioned ministers who have completed all their educational requirements may vote to elect the clergy delegates to General and jurisdictional conferences (¶¶ 327.2, 602.1b). They may not be elected as delegates themselves: “They shall not be eligible for election as delegates to the General, central, or jurisdictional conferences” (¶ 327.3), and our Constitution restricts the pool, providing that clergy delegates “shall be elected from the clergy members in full connection” while listing a wider electorate that includes associate members, qualified provisional members, and qualified local pastors. So a commissioned minister helps choose who will speak for the conference and cannot be among those who speak. That may be exactly right for a season of testing. It is another place where the church has arranged a real distinction and never said what it rests on.

The second is that the church has never clearly said what distinguishes the Spirit’s work in commissioning from the Spirit’s work in ordination. Both invoke the Spirit; both involve the laying on of hands; one withholds the stole. If the difference is real, it is the difference between being sent for a season to be tested and being sealed for life in an order, and the church should say so, teach it, and make the practice show it.

Practice

Let the Discipline’s account of commissioning say what the Ordinal already says. If commissioning is a sending, ¶ 325 should call it one, and should name Acts 13 as the church’s warrant.

Teach the difference. Every congregation receiving a commissioned minister should be told, in terms of God’s action, what has happened to this person and what has not, and why the stole was withheld.

Hold the provisional period to its purpose. If it is a season of evaluation, it should evaluate, it should conclude, and it should conclude in ordination or in an honest ending. The current provision by which a provisional member simply reaches an age and is discontinued treats a person’s vocation as a term of employment that ran out.

And say what commissioning is not. It is not a lesser ordination, and it is not a waiting room. It is the church saying to someone it believes God has called: go, we are sending you, and we will watch what God does through you before we say the rest.