Conclusion: One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic

I began by saying that we know the branding and have lost the substance, and I have to end by admitting that this was not quite right. We have the substance. It is in our prayers. What we have lost is the connection between what we pray and how we order our common life, and once you start looking for that gap you find it everywhere: in a paragraph on licensing that never mentions God beside a rite that asks whether a person is moved by the Holy Spirit; in an ordinal that says ordination confers a new role beside official language that will only say what ordination is not; in questions about Christian perfection asked in unison and answered by applause.

The claim I have made throughout is that a doctrine of ministry has to run downward from God, and that this is not a methodological preference but the way Methodist doctrine works. Wesley’s convictions about providence, about the human person, about grace, all radiate from what he believed about God. If our doctrine of orders cannot be derived the same way, it is not doctrine. And the sentence I would put at the center of the whole thing is the one the ordinands already say for themselves, when they are asked whether they are going on to perfection and answer, I am, by the grace of God: God does not call the qualified. God qualifies the called.

The creed gives four marks of the church. They are a good place to test whether any of this has been worth saying.

One. We are a church of tiers, and the tiers do not correspond to anything our theology can name. We have ministers whose standing survives the loss of a post and ministers whose standing does not. We have an order that holds its members accountable and a fellowship that offers its members support and asks nothing, and we have arranged it so that the people asked for least are the ones on whom a third of our congregations depend. None of that came from a doctrine. It accumulated, one reasonable adjustment at a time, and the accumulation now teaches our people something about who counts that no one ever voted for. The unity of a church is not damaged only by schism. It is damaged by a settled arrangement that says, in the one language everyone reads, that some ministries are provisional forever.

Holy. Election is free in its ground and exacting in its end. God chooses without regard to what we bring, and chooses us for holiness, which is why a theology that begins in grace ends in a demanding test rather than an easy one. Wesley’s three marks are more exacting than any credential, because fruit cannot be earned by attending anything and cannot be certified by an institution; someone has to have watched, and someone has to be willing to say what they saw. A church serious about holiness would rather ask a hard question it might have to act on than a safe one that yields a file. It would also ask its candidates about perfection in a way that admitted of a disappointing answer.

Catholic. We are a small part of a large church, and on the questions in this document the wider church has been talking for a century and has said things we have not troubled to hear. The Lima text holds together what we have been unable to say in the same breath, that ordination is “an action by God and the community.” It affirms without embarrassment that a church may ordain people who remain in other occupations, and that preparation “may take a form other than that of prolonged academic study.” We already quote that document in our own teaching. We have simply not let it teach us.

And we have something to give, which is the more Methodist half of catholicity. The ecumenical text authenticates a call by the church’s recognition of a person’s gifts and graces. That is Wesley’s first two marks, and the third is missing. Have they fruit? Are any truly convinced of sin, and converted to God, by their preaching? We should offer that question to the wider church, not as a correction, but as the thing our tradition has kept and might usefully hand on.

Apostolic. Here we must be more careful than we usually are, because our own first bishops were blunter than we are comfortable being. Coke and Asbury declared the doctrine of uninterrupted succession “utterly indefensible” and said that with the idea “exploded,” the Methodist church has everything Scriptural and essential to justify its episcopacy. They grounded the office in the church’s consent and in its fruit. So when we say apostolic we cannot mean an unbroken chain of hands, and we should stop letting the word do quiet work it cannot support. What we can mean, and what the ecumenical conversation gives us language for, is the apostolic tradition of the whole church: the gospel handed on, believed, and lived. And we can mean the plainer thing the word says. An apostle is someone who is sent. A church is apostolic when it goes on being sent, and it orders its ministry rightly when its offices are the shapes that sending takes.

Which returns to where the document started, and to what is actually at stake in all this precision. I have argued that vagueness about ordination is not reverence, and that its real effect is to leave no one accountable, because you cannot hold a person to a trust whose content the church has never been willing to state. The reverse is also true, and it is the more hopeful half. A church that can say what God does through its offices can ask its officers to be faithful to it, by name, and can say when they have not been. It can tell a licensed local pastor what she is, rather than what she is not yet. It can tell a deacon that his work in the world is the church’s work and not an auxiliary to it. It can tell a bishop that the staff came before the gavel, and mean it. And it can tell the layperson who has led this congregation’s ministry for thirty years that her baptism was a commissioning and that nothing in the church’s order was ever meant to suggest she was someone who had failed to become something else.

Wesley’s conference had a form for receiving a preacher into full connexion. They handed him the Minutes, inscribed with a sentence:

“As long as you freely consent to, and earnestly endeavor to walk by, these Rules, we shall rejoice to acknowledge you as a fellow-laborer.”

Not a rank, not a contract, and not a permission. An acknowledgment, offered gladly, on terms both parties could state. We could say that again, to more people than we currently say it to, if we first did the work of knowing what we meant.