Extension Ministry

Principle

The ordained are sent. Appointment beyond a congregation is not a leave from the office but a direction of it: the elder ordered to the whole conference is sendable to any part of the conference’s work, and the deacon, ordained to carry the gathered life of Christians into the world, is doing in an extension ministry the very thing the order exists to do.

Background

The Discipline asks our question once, in its own voice, and it asks it here.

Twice in the paragraphs governing appointment beyond the local church, the church states that it is about to draw the line this document has been drawing. Categories of extension appointment are established, ¶ 344.1 says, “in order to establish a clear distinction between the work to which all Christians are called and the tasks for which clergy are appropriately prepared and authorized.” The appointment of a deacon, ¶ 331.2b says, “shall be clarified by a written statement of intentionality of servant leadership in order to establish a clear distinction between the work to which all Christians are called and the work for which deacons and provisional deacons are appropriately prepared and authorized.”

That is the right question, and it appears at the right moment. It appears here because this is where the pressure is felt. A pastor in a pulpit is doing something the church has a thousand years of language for. A chaplain in a trauma bay, a professor in a classroom, a director of a nonprofit, and a conference treasurer are doing work that gifted lay Christians also do, and do well, and the church knows it. So it is exactly at the boundary of the congregation that the church reaches for an account of what ordination adds.

Here is the account it gives. The first category of extension appointment is “Appointments for which the annual conference provides for pension contributions to the Ministerial Pension Plan, amended and restated effective January 1, 2007, as the Clergy Retirement Security Program, such as district superintendents, staff members of conference councils and boards, treasurers, bishops’ assistants, superintendents or directors of parish development, general evangelists, and campus ministers” (¶ 344.1a(1)). The second is defined by which pension plan a general agency pays into. For deacons, the promised clarification is discharged by a written statement of intentionality.

The church asks what distinguishes the work of the ordained from the work of every Christian, and answers with the name of a retirement plan.

I have said once already in this document that our paragraphs on ministry go silent about God at the moment they most need to speak. This is the second instance and the sharpest, because the first never raised the question. The licensing paragraph does not ask what a license is for; it lists background checks and course counts. This paragraph asks, in a subordinate clause of admirable clarity, and then satisfies itself with a benefits category. A pension plan is a fine thing and ministers should have one. It cannot bear the weight of establishing a clear distinction between the work of the ordained and the work of the baptized.

The theology has not vanished from these paragraphs. It has been pushed into the residual category. ¶ 344.1d covers “Other Valid Christian Ministries,” the appointments that fit nowhere else, and it is the only category that asks anything of God. Those seeking such an appointment “shall submit a written statement to the cabinet, and the Board of Ordained Ministry, describing in detail the proposed setting for their ministry, sharing a sense of calling to that ministry and their gifts and evidence of God’s grace for it, and expressing the intentional fulfillment of their ordination vows.” The statement is due 120 days in advance. The Board must approve. The appointment must then be “confirmed by a two-thirds vote of the clergy members of the annual conference.”

Set that beside ¶ 343.4, which provides that appointments of full members and associate members under the other categories “are valid on their face and do not require Board of Ordained Ministry approval.”

The church inquires into a call in inverse proportion to its own control of the setting. Where the conference signs the paycheck, the appointment is valid on its face. Where it does not, the church wants a sense of calling, gifts, evidence of God’s grace, and a two-thirds vote. That is precisely backwards if ordination is what this document has argued it is, and it is exactly right if what is really being administered is employment. Notice also, since the pattern has held everywhere else in this document, which of Wesley’s three marks the paragraph asks for. Grace and gifts, and no fruit.

Now the constructive half, because the church’s own arrangements contain a better account than the one it wrote down.

Sending is not a departure from ordained ministry. It is the New Testament’s ordinary shape for it. The one laying on of hands in Acts that is not for an order of the church is the sending at Antioch: “Separate Barnabas and Saul for me, for the work to which I have called them.’ Then, when they had fasted and prayed and laid their hands on them, they sent them away” (Acts 13:2–3). Our commissioning rite is built on that text and prays “Send him now.” The congregation that lays hands on those two does not receive them back into its own leadership; it loses them to the work. If the church wants a scriptural picture of hands laid on someone for a ministry beyond the local congregation, it has been using one for years.

And the derivation this document has already made for itineracy yields extension ministry with nothing added. The elder is not ordained to a congregation but received into an order and into an annual conference, and belongs to the whole of it. The conference’s work is not only its congregations. It includes the hospital where its people die, the campus where its young adults are formed, the agency through which it feeds people, and the school where its ministers are taught. An elder ordered to the whole is sendable to any of it. Our polity half knows this and says so in a sentence it does not seem to have noticed: “Elders and associate members in extension ministries remain full participants in the itinerant system” (¶ 343.5). Itineracy and extension are one doctrine, not two.

For deacons the case is stronger and should be stated first. The order exists to relate the gathered life of Christians to their ministry in the world, and to lead the church out to where its service is needed. A deacon appointed to a congregation is doing that from inside; a deacon appointed to a school, a clinic, or an agency of mercy is doing it from where it lands. ¶ 331.1 lists the congregation first and extension second, and there is no theological reason for the order of that list. The deacon in an extension ministry is the paradigm case of the order rather than a variance from it, and a church that treated it that way would stop speaking of these appointments as though they were exceptions requiring justification.

What, then, does ordination add in a place where the work looks lay? Not technique. A hospital chaplain’s skill in sitting with the dying is a human and learned skill, and there are lay Christians who have more of it than most elders. The office is not a claim about competence. It is that this person stands in that room sent by the church and answerable to it, carrying what the church has authorized them to carry, so that a sacrament is available where the congregation cannot go. Our own paragraph says it, in the middle of a subsection about charge conference membership: all elders in full connection, “including those in extension ministries, shall be available and on call to administer the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper as required by the Discipline and requested by the district superintendent of the district in which the appointment is held” (¶ 344.3a). The office travels with the person. That sentence is the theological content the pension clause was standing in for, and it was in the paragraph all along.

Two difficulties should be named rather than smoothed.

The first is that ¶ 343.5 treats extension as a loan against the pastorate. Elders in extension “must be willing upon consultation to receive an appointment in a pastoral charge.” The obligation is right and the reason usually given for it is wrong. It is not that congregational appointment is the real ministry and this is a season away from it. It is that the covenant runs to the whole conference, which is the same reason the pastor of a congregation must be willing to be sent to a campus.

The second concerns the superintendency. The district superintendent appears in this document as an instance of ¶ 344.1a(1), in a list that runs “district superintendents, staff members of conference councils and boards, treasurers, bishops’ assistants.” If oversight is what the order of elders does for one another, as the section on the elder argued, then filing superintendency under appointments that extend the ministry beyond the local church has it backwards. Superintendency is not an extension of the eldership into something else. It is the eldership’s own interior practice, gathered into a person for a term. We have classified the order’s watch over itself as an outward assignment, and then been puzzled that it feels like administration.

Practice

Ask ¶ 344.1d’s question of every extension appointment. The church has already written the sentence it needs, and applies it only to the ministries it does not employ. A sense of calling to this ministry, the gifts for it, and evidence of God’s grace in it can be asked of the campus minister, the seminary professor, and the conference treasurer on the same terms as they are asked of the founder of an unclassified ministry. Nothing new has to be drafted. The clause has to be moved.

Recognize what the church already does here, and give it back to the whole system. These paragraphs contain the only genuinely contextual, retrospective, evidence-based evaluation of ministry in our polity. Effectiveness “shall be evaluated in the context of the specific setting in which their ministry is performed” (¶ 343.1). An annual written report “shall serve as the basis for the evaluation of these clergy in light of the missional needs of the Church and the fulfillment of their licensing or ordination” (¶ 344.2a). The bishop “shall provide for an annual visit to the ministry setting” of every such person within the conference (¶ 344.2b). Read those three provisions together and the church has built, for the clergy who work furthest from it, exactly the inquiry it stopped making of everyone else: someone goes and looks, in the setting, once a year, and asks whether this ministry is answering to the ordination it rests on. That is not a burden imposed on extension ministers. It is a gift the church made and forgot it had.

State the distinction the paragraph promises. If a General Conference will not say what ordination adds to work that lay Christians also do, it should stop writing sentences that announce it is about to.

And stop describing these appointments as beyond. The older language, appointments beyond the local church, made the congregation the center and everything else the periphery. The current heading is better, appointments extending the ministry of The United Methodist Church, and it should be believed. A church whose mission is to the world will find much of its ministry outside its buildings, and the ministers it sends there are not at the edge of its work. They are where it is going.