What an Office Is

Our Discipline begins its account of ordination with a sentence that is better than anything built on it: “Ordination to this ministry is a gift from God to the church” (¶ 303.1). I want to take that sentence at face value and ask what would follow if we meant it.

A gift from God to the church. Not a status granted by the church to a person who earned it. Not a permission the institution issues and can adjust as staffing requires. A gift, given by God, and given to the church rather than to the one ordained. If that is what ordination is, then three familiar ways of construing an office are ruled out before we begin.

An office is not a rank. Nothing in Scripture supports the notion that ordination moves a person closer to God, and Wesley, who spent his life insisting that the plainest believer might know God as fully as any priest, would have regarded the suggestion as a species of blasphemy. Whatever difference an office makes, it makes no difference to the standing of the person before God.

An office is not an employment class. This is our most common confusion, and the one that has quietly organized our conversations for decades. When we ask what distinguishes an elder and answer with security of appointment, or compensation floors, or conference membership, we are not doing theology badly; we are not doing theology at all. Those are the terms of an employment relationship. They may be good terms or bad ones, but they cannot bear the weight of an office.

An office is not a credential tier. A credential certifies that a person has met a standard. If ordination is essentially a credential, then the orders are ranked by the length of the preparation behind them, and the whole system becomes a ladder with the seminary at the top. We will see in Part Two how nearly we have built exactly this, and how much theological damage it has done.

What, then, is it?

An office in Christ’s church is a distinct and real participation in a distinct mode of Christ’s own continuing ministry, given by God to the church, exercised in the church’s name, and entrusted to particular persons whom God has called and the church has recognized. Christ is the one who serves, who teaches and feeds, who oversees the flock. He has not withdrawn from these; he continues them. And he continues them in part by giving the church people through whom he does them, so that a congregation encountering its deacon or its elder is encountering something Christ is doing, not merely something the denomination has arranged.

Everything in Part Two is an attempt to say, for each office, what mode of Christ’s ministry it participates in.

Does ordination effect something, or recognize something?

This is the question the church has been avoiding, and the avoidance has a shape worth naming. Recent official language has been careful to deny that ordination effects an ontological change in the person, while declining to say what it does instead. The denial is understandable. Behind it stands a long argument with other traditions about indelible character, and a proper Protestant nervousness about clergy who imagine themselves to be a different species of Christian. But a denial is not a doctrine. If we tell the church only what ordination is not, we should not be surprised when the church concludes that it is nothing in particular, and starts explaining it by salary and appointment instead.

I think the question is malformed, and that our own tradition has the resources to say so.

Return to the pattern in the call narratives. God calls, and the calling is what makes the called one fit (the coal on the lips, the words put into the mouth). If that is how God works, then by the time the church acts, God has already been acting, and the church’s act cannot be the origin of anything. In that sense ordination recognizes: it declares what God has done and is doing, and it can be wrong, which is why the examination matters. But the church’s act is not therefore an empty announcement, because God has not stopped working. The church ordains by praying, and by laying on hands, and asking God to give what the office requires is not a formality attached to the recognition. It is the church participating in the same qualifying work that the call began.

So ordination effects and recognizes, and the two are not in competition. It recognizes a call that God made effective before the church arrived, and it is itself an occasion of God’s continuing to make that call effective.

We are not the first to notice this, and we are not out on a limb in saying it. The Lima text holds both halves together without any visible embarrassment, and it does so as a document answerable to churches that agree about very little else in this area.

Its definition puts them together: “Properly speaking, then, ordination denotes an action by God and the community by which the ordained are strengthened by the Spirit for their task and are upheld by the acknowledgment and prayers of the congregation.” An action by God and the community. The document then describes the act of ordination as three things at once, “invocation of the Holy Spirit (epiklesis); sacramental sign; acknowledgment of gifts and commitment,” and it is worth seeing how far the middle term goes: the church ordains “in confidence that God, being faithful to his promise in Christ, enters sacramentally into contingent, historical forms of human relationship and uses them for his purpose,” so that ordination is “a sign performed in faith that the spiritual relationship signified is present in, with and through the words spoken, the gestures made and the forms employed.”

That is not the language of a church too shy to say whether anything happens.

Note also what the Lima text says is established: not a quality inside the ordinand but “the new relation which is established between this minister and the local Christian community and, by intention, the Church universal.” And it is careful about whose the gift is. Authority “is not to be understood as the possession of the ordained person but as a gift for the continuing edification of the body in and for which the minister has been ordained.”

United Methodists have adopted these sentences. We have simply not built anything on them.

And we already behave as though we believed it. The Discipline provides that “in keeping with ancient Christian teaching and our Wesleyan tradition, we affirm that ordination for the same, or equivalent order, is not repeatable” (¶ 303.5). Consider what that rule implies. Nobody declines to repeat a mere announcement. If ordination were only the church’s public acknowledgment of a fact, there would be no reason not to acknowledge the fact again. We renew our baptismal vows, we reaffirm our covenants, we say true things twice all the time. We do not re-ordain because we believe that something was done which does not need doing again. Our practice has been confessing an effective ordination while our official language has been carefully declining to.

The Lima text has the same rule and gives the reason ours withholds. It says that ordination is never repeated “in recognition of the God-given charism of ministry.” Our Discipline grounds the rule in ancient teaching and our own tradition, which is to say in custom. Lima grounds it in the thing itself. Something was given by God, and you do not ask God for it twice.

I do not think we should be embarrassed about this, and I do not think we need scholastic machinery to say it. The realism here does not require a metaphysical substance to be altered in the ordinand. It requires only what Wesley believed about God: that God’s word does what it says. When God tells Jeremiah “I have put my words in your mouth,” the words are there. When the church prays for the Holy Spirit to make a person a faithful elder in Christ’s church, either that prayer is answered or our whole doctrine of prayer is a courtesy. What is effected is not a change in the person’s nature or worth. It is a real relation: this person now stands in the church, and before God, as one through whom Christ does a particular thing, and they will stand there whether or not they are appointed, whether or not they are paid, and whether or not they are any good at it.

Why this is the ground of accountability

Which brings me to the reason a study document should care about any of this.

If ordination is a vague honor, then unfaithfulness in office is a personnel matter, handled by whatever process the institution finds convenient, with the vocabulary of covenant deployed mainly to encourage cooperation. This is roughly where we are. Our language about ministry has become so general that it can be affirmed by everyone and violated by anyone, and complaint processes carry a weight that theology no longer carries.

If ordination is what I have described, accountability follows without effort. Something was given, and it was given for the church rather than to the minister. There is therefore a thing to be faithful to, and its content is specifiable: this mode of Christ’s ministry, exercised in this church, in this covenant, before this God. An elder who will not preside, a deacon who will not lead the church toward the world, a bishop who will not oversee, are not underperforming employees. They are failing to be what the church prayed they would be made.

Vagueness has been defended among us as reverence. Its practical effect is the opposite: it protects no mystery and it shields the unfaithful, because you cannot hold a person to a trust whose content the church has never been willing to state.