The Creature Who Is Called

A call requires someone who can be called. That sounds obvious, and it is precisely the step our discussions of ministry skip. We talk a great deal about who should be ordained and almost never about what a human being is such that God addresses one at all. But an account of ordination that has no anthropology under it will drift, inevitably, toward describing ministers as functionaries with permissions, because it has never said what kind of creature is standing there.

Wesley’s answer is more specific than the pieties that usually occupy this ground. Preaching on the redemption of the whole creation, he asked what the image of God in humanity actually consists of, and answered: “In these, in the power of self-motion, understanding, will, and liberty, the natural image of God consisted.” The human person images God in being able to move oneself, to understand, to will, and to be free. Elsewhere, examining what we mean by liberty, he called it “a power of self-determination,” and he was careful about its extent: it does not govern every thought and imagination that crosses the mind, but it does govern our words and our actions in general.

This is not a minor piece of Wesley’s system. It is the piece on which he refused predestination, defended the possibility of holiness, and made sense of grace as something a person could resist or receive. And it descends directly from his doctrine of God. Because God is free Spirit, the creature made in God’s image is free; because God is not compelled, the creature is not a mechanism. Take liberty out of Wesley’s anthropology and his entire soteriology collapses.

Now put that anthropology under the call narratives, and see what it yields.

A human being, on this account, is a creature capable of being addressed and capable of answering. Not merely used, since God can use anything, and Scripture is happy to say that God uses ravens and donkeys and the weather. To be addressed is different. It is to be spoken to as one who can say “Here I am,” or can decline to. When God calls Moses and Moses argues, the arguing is not an interruption of the call; it is evidence that the creature God has called is the kind of creature God made. When Jeremiah protests, God overrules him and does not override him. He goes.

This gives us a first, load-bearing conclusion. The capacity to be called belongs to human beings as such, by creation. It is not conferred by education, by a committee, or by an order of ministry. Whatever ordination is, it cannot be the thing that makes a person addressable by God, because that was true of them already.

Baptism and the ministry of all Christians

To creation Scripture adds a second event, and it is the one our tradition has taught us to treat as decisive.

In baptism a person is incorporated into the body of Christ and receives, with that incorporation, a share in Christ’s own ministry. Our own teaching document on baptism says it with a precision worth quoting exactly: “Through baptism, God calls and commissions persons to the general ministry of all Christian believers.” And then, having said that, By Water and the Spirit takes the further step that most treatments of ministry never take. It says that when God calls some from within that general ministry to representative ministry, “their ordination to Word, Sacrament, and Order… is grounded in the same baptism that commissions the general priesthood of all believers.”

The same baptism. Not a higher initiation, not a second and superior grace, not an entry into a class of Christian that the baptized may aspire to. The ordained minister’s authorization to stand at the font is grounded in the water they themselves were washed in.

The Discipline opens its account of ministry with the ministry of all Christians (¶¶ 126–131), and the sequence is exactly right: the whole church receives the call, and set-apart ministry is named afterward, as something that happens within that call rather than above it. But read on and watch what the ministry of the laity comes to mean in practice. It becomes a preamble. It becomes the paragraph you affirm before getting to the paragraphs that matter, which are about credentials, categories, and appointments. Most damagingly, it becomes a pipeline: lay ministry valued as the soil out of which clergy grow, so that the layperson who will never be ordained and has led this congregation’s work for thirty years appears in our theology only as someone who did not become something else.

If baptism is what By Water and the Spirit says it is, that is an error about God, not merely a failure of appreciation. The baptized person has been called and commissioned. Their ministry is not preparation for ministry. It is ministry, and the church owes it the same seriousness of formation, accountability, and support that it gives to the ministry of the ordained. That claim has real consequences, and we will return to it when we ask what the annual conference is for.

Two clarifications keep this from collapsing into a flatness that helps no one.

First, saying that all the baptized share Christ’s ministry does not mean that all ministries are the same ministry. Paul’s insistence in 1 Corinthians 12 is the opposite: one Spirit, and a genuine diversity of gifts and services and workings, given “to each one… for the profit of all.” A body whose parts are interchangeable is not a body. The question this document has to answer is what kind of difference the offices are, given that they are not differences of rank, of Christian standing, or of proximity to God.

Second, and more sharply: if the ministry of the baptized is real ministry, then no office can be justified merely by the work it does. Laypeople preach, teach, counsel, visit prisoners, feed the hungry, lead worship, plant churches, and carry consecrated bread to those who could not come. If an account of the elder or the deacon rests on a list of activities, it will not survive contact with a well-organized congregation, because the laity are already doing nearly everything on the list. Whatever distinguishes the offices has to be sought somewhere other than in the tasks. It has to be sought in what God is doing.