Licensing

Principle

The church must be able to say, in terms of God’s action, what it does when it licenses a person for pastoral ministry, and how that act stands in relation to ordination. A ministry the church depends upon for a third of its pulpits, and authorizes to preside at font and table, cannot be left without a theological account.

Background

Read ¶ 315, the paragraph that governs licensing for pastoral ministry, and notice what is in it. Psychological reports. Criminal background and credit checks. A notarized statement about convictions and accusations. A certificate of good health on the prescribed form. Completion of the studies for the license, or one third of the work toward a Master of Divinity. Approval by three-fourths votes of the district committee, the Board of Ordained Ministry, and the clergy session.

Every one of those provisions is sensible. Not one of them is theological. The paragraph by which our church authorizes a person to baptize and to preside at the Lord’s table does not mention God.

Now read the rite. When a bishop or district superintendent presents licenses to local pastors, the church says this:

“We have inquired diligently concerning him (her, them) and have found him (her, them) to be fit for this sacred vocation.”

And this, to the candidate:

“Do you believe you are moved by the Holy Spirit to serve as a local pastor?”

And then it prays:

“We thank you for Name, whom we set aside in your Name as a local pastor. Prepare him in body, mind, and spirit for his task, and continue him in your grace, that he may increase and bless your Church through his labors.”

That is a serious theology of licensing, and it has been in our books all along. The diligent inquiry is Wesley’s “Inquire,” and it survives here at exactly the point where ¶ 336 dropped it from the examination of elders. “Moved by the Holy Spirit” is Wesley’s own question from 1744, nearly word for word. The church declares the person fit for a sacred vocation and then asks God to prepare them, which is to say it declares them fit and immediately asks God to make them so. The licensing rite confesses that God qualifies the called.

So the honest statement of the problem is not that the church has no theology of licensing. It is that the church’s theology of licensing lives in its prayers and has never been allowed anywhere near its law.

The rites also do something the Discipline does not: they distinguish licensing from ordination in terms of divine action rather than permission. At an ordination the bishop lays both hands on the head and prays, “pour upon Name the Holy Spirit, for the office and work of an elder in Christ’s holy church,” and then says, “take authority as an elder.” At a licensing there is no invocation of the Spirit for an office, no “take authority,” and no stole. The language is “we set aside,” “you are hereby authorized,” and, tellingly, “take care that you perform these duties faithfully as much as you are able.” Something different is being done, and our liturgy knows it even where our paragraphs do not.

What Wesley did, and what he refused

The category is his. The office of a Helper in the Large Minutes is defined by a lack: “In the absence of a Minister, to feed and guide the flock.” The Methodist preachers were justified in part by supply, sent “to supply their lack of service toward those who are perishing for want of knowledge.” Anyone who says that authorizing ministry because a congregation would otherwise go without is a modern compromise has not read our founding documents. It is how the movement started.

But Wesley never let the need stand by itself, and four features of his practice are missing from ours.

He paired the need with a divine sending. The Large Minutes head this material “The Design of God in Sending the Methodist Preachers,” and answer that they are to be considered “as messengers sent by the Lord, out of the common way.” The supply argument and the sending claim are in the same sentence. Our ¶ 315 has kept the supply and dropped the sending; only the liturgy still asks whether the person is moved by the Holy Spirit.

He did not tie them to a place. The eleventh rule of a Helper is “You have nothing to do but to save souls. Therefore spend and be spent in this work. And go always, not only to those who want you, but to those who want you most,” with the gloss that “it is not your business to preach so many times, and to take care of this or that society.” Our licensed local pastors are authorized to preside at the sacraments “within and while appointed to a particular charge” (¶ 317.1). Wesley’s provisional preacher went everywhere and could not touch the sacraments. Ours may touch the sacraments and only in one place.

He refused them the sacraments, and said why. In The Ministerial Office (1789) he told the English preachers that being called to preach does not commission anyone “to baptize, or to administer the Lord’s Supper,” and ended: “O contain yourselves within your own bounds… In God’s name, stop there!”

And his provisional status had an end. This is the one that indicts us most directly:

“Taking on trial is entirely different from admitting a Preacher. One on trial may be either admitted or rejected, without doing him any wrong; otherwise it would be no trial at all.”

Four years, then admitted or rejected, and admission was not a credential but a sentence of recognition: “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.”

A licensed local pastor’s license is renewed annually (¶ 317.2), and may be renewed for a working lifetime. We have kept Wesley’s provisional category and removed the terminus that made it honest. By his own standard, a trial that cannot end is not a trial.

What Wesley did when the deprivation was sacramental

Set beside 1789 the letter he wrote to the American Methodists five years earlier. His scruple about ordaining had never been doctrinal; he had believed for years, on Lord King’s argument, that “Bishops and Presbyters are the same order, and consequently have the same right to ordain.” What restrained him was that England had a church actually supplying the sacraments. America did not:

“In America there are none, neither any parish Ministers. So that for some hundred miles together, there is none either to baptize or to administer the Lord’s Supper. Here therefore my scruples are at an end… I have accordingly appointed Dr. Coke and Mr. Francis Asbury to be joint Superintendents… as also Richard Whatcoat and Thomas Vasey, to act as Elders among them, by baptizing and administering the Lord’s Supper.”

When the deprivation was sacramental, Wesley’s remedy was ordination. He did not devise a licensed sub-order. He ordained.

What our church did for a century and a half

And so did we. From 1789 the Methodist Episcopal Church authorized its bishops “to ordain local preachers to the office of deacons.” From 1813 a local deacon became eligible for elder’s orders, on a recommendation certifying his gifts and “the necessity of his official services as an elder in the circuit where he resides.” Local ordination was not an emergency measure; it was routine annual business, and the conference minutes had standing questions for it: What others have been elected and ordained Deacons? As Local Preachers. What others have been elected and ordained Elders? As Local Deacons.

It lasted a very long time. The Disciplines of 1876, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in 1906, and of 1920 all carry it, and it did not end there. As late as 1964 the Judicial Council was ruling on the ministerial authority of local preachers, ordained and unordained alike, treating both as live categories, and in 1987 it was still deciding questions about local deacons and local elders. The practice of ordaining them ended in 1976. In 1920 the path is spelled out: a local preacher completes the Four Years’ Course of Study for Local Preachers and is ordained deacon; four years later, with further prescribed studies, he is ordained elder; and an elder “has authority to preach; to conduct Divine Worship; to solemnize Matrimony, and to administer the Sacraments.”

Two things follow that ought to change how we discuss this.

The first is that our Course of Study was designed to end in ordination. The 1906 Discipline calls it “the Course of Study prescribed by the Bishops as a preparation for elder’s orders.” The same curriculum that once made a man an elder now makes a person a licensed local pastor. Nothing changed in kind about the education. What changed is where the road stops.

The second is more important. In that system, ordination, conference membership, and itineracy were three separable things. A local elder was ordained, with credentials and sacramental authority. He was not a member of the annual conference; the 1920 Discipline provides that “every Local Preacher, ordained or unordained, not having a Pastoral Charge, shall be a member of, and amenable to, the Quarterly Conference where he resides.” And he did not itinerate; he was ordained precisely because his own circuit needed an elder.

The Judicial Council went further than that, and its language is worth having exactly. Ruling in 1987 on where such people stood, it held: “Local deacons and elders are lay persons, members of and accountable to a Charge Conference. Under the 1964 Discipline these persons were considered lay persons and this has not been changed.” They were tried, when it came to that, under the provisions governing the trial of a lay person.

So the separation went further than three variables. In our own polity, ordination and lay status were not mutually exclusive. The church laid hands on these people, gave them credentials and the authority to baptize and preside within a charge, and went on counting them among the laity. Whatever else that arrangement was, it was not a church that believed ordination must carry clergy status with it. A reader may well find this troubling from the other direction, and the worry deserves stating: an ordination that leaves a person a layperson may look like an ordination emptied of meaning. That is a fair question, and the church should answer it. What cannot be said, after 1987, is that we have no way to ordain someone who will not be a conference member.

We have fused all three. Ordination now entails conference membership, which entails availability for appointment. And that fusion, rather than any doctrine, is what makes the modern question feel unanswerable. When we say we cannot ordain a licensed local pastor, what we usually mean is that ordination now carries a career with it and this person is not available for that career. That is a statement about our polity, not about God, and we are the ones who made it true.

How we got here, which is less deliberate than it looks

The record does not show a church deciding that local ministry should be permanently unordained. It shows drift.

The decisive moment turns out to be 1976, and the legislation of that year is worth reading closely, because it does three things at once and we have kept only two of them.

It granted the sacraments. A local pastor was “authorized to perform all the duties of a pastor… including the Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion as well as the service of marriage, burial, confirmation, and membership reception, while assigned to a particular charge under the specific supervision of a counseling elder subject to annual renewal” (¶ 408.1, 1976).

It ended the ordaining. The same legislation carries a clause preserving what it was discontinuing: “None of the provisions in this legislation shall be interpreted to change or limit authorizations to persons ordained as deacon and elder prior to 1976 or enrolled in the appropriate studies prior to January 1, 1977” (¶ 409.5, 1976). That sentence is how we know the date. It travels forward into the Disciplines of 1980 and 1992, protecting a shrinking remainder, which is why the Judicial Council was still ruling on the status of local deacons and elders in 1987 and why the category is otherwise absent by 1992. Before 1976 the church ordained these ministers. After 1976 it licensed them and gave them the Table instead.

And it said what the license was for, in a sentence that should be read aloud in every conversation we now have about local pastors:

“The license as a local pastor is given only for the purpose of the practice of ministry while one is in preparation for conference membership and ordination.” (¶ 407, 1976)

Only for the purpose of the practice of ministry while one is in preparation for ordination. The General Conference that authorized unordained persons to baptize and preside did not believe it was creating a permanent order. It believed it was equipping people who were on their way, and it said so in the paragraph headed “Authority of a Licensed Person.”

That third element is the one that fell out, and its disappearance is the whole difficulty. We kept the sacramental authority and we kept the withholding of orders, and we quietly dropped the assumption that made the combination coherent, which was that this was a condition people were passing through. What was designed as a way-station now holds a third of our appointed pastoral leadership, some of them for thirty years, renewed one year at a time. Wesley said that a trial which cannot end is no trial. The 1976 legislation said, in effect, the same thing, and we have made a permanent estate out of a preparation.

In 1960 the figure is “an unordained approved supply pastor,” permitted to administer the sacraments while appointed to a charge. In 1968, at the union, the new Discipline removed that authority: a lay pastor “shall not be authorized to administer the Sacraments.” In 1976 the General Conference restored it. The church reversed itself on a sacramental question twice in eight years, and neither decision left behind a theological account that has survived.

Then the category itself blurred. The Discipline still called a local pastor “a lay person” in 1988, and struck the phrase in 1992. Full-time local pastors were made clergy members of the annual conference in 1988, part-time in 1996. In eight years the church moved these ministers into conference membership and deleted the word “lay,” without ever saying what they had become instead.

And the door out closed by accident. Associate members were still “eligible for ordination as a deacon” in the 1968 Discipline, by direct descent from 1789. In 1996 the church created the deacon in full connection, giving the diaconate its own permanent order, and the ordained-deacon track for associate members was phased out with it. When associate membership returned in 2004, new associate members would be licensed pastors “instead of an ordained deacon as was the case prior to 1996.”

The reform that finally gave deacons a real and permanent order closed the only door through which non-itinerant ministers had been ordained since 1789. Nobody set out to do that. It happened while the church was fixing something else, and no one has given a theological account of it since.

The thing our polity says out loud

One provision states the church’s actual position more clearly than any argument could.

For elders and deacons, retirement is a relation. ¶ 358 says retired clergy members “have been placed in the retired relation,” and they remain members of the annual conference.

For local pastors, retirement is discontinuance. ¶ 320.1 lists it in the same clause as severing relationship with the church and having one’s appointment ended: “whenever a local pastor retires… license and credentials shall be surrendered,” and “the former local pastor shall designate the local church in which membership shall be held.” A retired local pastor not under appointment attends annual conference “with voice but not vote.” A retired local pastor who wishes to go on baptizing must annually request a license to serve “in the local church where they hold membership.”

A ministry that ends when the job ends was a job. Retirement is the moment when the work stops and only the relation remains, which makes it the moment a church finally says what a standing always was. For elders and deacons something remains. For local pastors nothing does.

The fork

Here is the question, with both horns at full strength. I am not going to choose between them. The church has to.

One. If what God does through a licensed local pastor is the same divine action that ordination recognizes and effects, then the church should ordain them, and the machinery that prevents it is our own and can be changed. The evidence is considerable. The church prays over these people that God will prepare them and continue them in grace. It declares them fit for a sacred vocation after diligent inquiry. It sends them to baptize and to preside at the Lord’s table, which is the work of an elder. Wesley ordained when the deprivation was sacramental. We ordained local preachers, on the ground of local necessity, for a century and a half, using the very course of study these people now complete. On this reading, licensing is a selection mechanism laid over an electing God: it sorts by attributes the candidate brought with them, in a church whose own doctrine is that God supplies what the called lack.

Two. If what God does through a licensed local pastor is genuinely different from what ordination effects, then the church should say what the difference is, in terms of God’s action, and should stop using the language of ordination around it. There is a real case. Our rites do distinguish: no invocation of the Spirit for an office, no “take authority,” no stole, and an authorization bounded by an appointment. Wesley, faced with preachers among a people who did have access to ordained ministry, told them to stop at preaching. The scarcity we face is relative rather than absolute; a church with thousands of elders is not the America of 1784. A church may licitly authorize a person for a season, for a purpose, without ordaining them, and Wesley’s “extraordinary messengers” were exactly that.

Three. And there is a possibility the debate almost never names, which is that a ministry can be permanently recognized without being ordained, because we already do it. The Office of Deaconess and Home Missioner is lay, and it is also an office: consecrated and commissioned by a bishop, appointed by a bishop and printed in the conference journal, permanently recorded, pensioned, seated at annual conference with voice and vote, subject to the church’s judicial process, and held in what our own Discipline calls “a covenant of mutual commitment, accountability and support.” The historic rite of consecration invoked the Holy Spirit, set the person apart, and admitted her to an office in the triune name, marking the difference from ordination in the gesture rather than by withholding the theology. Whatever else is true, the church clearly knows how to constitute a lifelong lay ministry with dignity and accountability. On this reading the problem with licensing is not that it withholds ordination but that it is a thin and provisional thing where a substantial and permanent thing is possible.

And there is the position we actually occupy, which is the only one that cannot be defended. We borrow ordination’s theology and withhold its recognition. We pray for the Spirit’s preparation and call it authorization. We declare a sacred vocation and attach it to an appointment. We ask people to be provisional for thirty years in a system whose founder said a trial that cannot end is no trial. And we make the whole standing depend on holding a post, so that when the post ends the credentials go back and the person is a layperson again.

Whichever horn the church takes, it will be telling the truth. The present arrangement is the only option that requires us not to.

Practice

Some things follow no matter how the fork is resolved.

Give the provisional relationship a terminus. If licensing is a trial, it must be capable of ending in admission or rejection. A license renewed annually for twenty-five years is not a probation; it is a permanent status the church has declined to name. Wesley’s four years is not the only possible answer, but “indefinitely” is not an answer at all.

Stop making ecclesial standing depend on employment. Whatever a licensed local pastor is, they should not cease to be it when a church closes. If the church means what its rite says about a sacred vocation, then retirement should be a relation for these ministers too, and the surrender of credentials should mean what it means for everyone else: that something has gone wrong, not that a person has finished serving.

Let the theology in the rites govern the paragraphs. ¶ 315 should be able to say what the liturgy already says. A paragraph authorizing sacramental ministry that never mentions God is not neutral; it teaches, and what it teaches is that this is an employment matter.

Separate the three variables again, at least in thought. Whether or not the church decides to ordain those in local ministry, it should stop saying that ordination is impossible for them, because that claim is false and our own history refutes it. What is true is that we have bound ordination to conference membership and itineracy. That binding may be wise. It is not given.

And ask the three marks of them, and mean it. These are the ministers whose fruit is most visible and whose credentials are thinnest, which is precisely the situation Wesley’s test was built for and precisely the situation a promise of future usefulness cannot see.