Part One: The Ground

Why This Document Asks What It Asks

Ask a room of United Methodists what an elder is, and you will get a list. An elder went to seminary. An elder itinerates. An elder has a guaranteed appointment. An elder presides at the Table, votes in the clergy session, and holds membership in an annual conference rather than in a local church. Every item on that list is true. Not one of them is a theological statement.

Try the same question about the others and the same thing happens. A deacon is ordained but does not itinerate and usually secures their own appointment. A licensed local pastor may preside at the sacraments within the charge to which they are appointed, and may not preside outside it. A bishop is an elder who has been elected and consecrated, is paid from a general church fund rather than by a conference, and serves for life. These are accurate descriptions. They describe a personnel system.

I do not think we can go on like this. When the church is asked what it means by ordination, it reaches for language that sounds theological and turns out, under any pressure, to be a description of what we already do. We know the branding and we have lost the substance. And the loss is not merely intellectual. Vague words about ministry are usually defended as humility, as an appropriate reticence before mystery. They function as something else. A trust that cannot say what is entrusted, to whom, or how it might be broken, is a trust no one can be held to. Imprecision at this level does not protect the mystery of ordination. It dissolves the accountability that ordination is supposed to create.

And then you open the service books, and the church is saying something else entirely.

At an ordination the bishop prays, “Father Almighty, pour upon Name the Holy Spirit, for the office and work of an elder in Christ’s holy church,” and then, with the ordinand’s hands on a Bible, says, “Full Name, take authority as an elder to preach the Word of God, to administer the Holy Sacraments and to order the life of the Church.” The Ordinal’s own introduction states, without hedging, that “ordination confers a new role in the life of the church as well as authority for leadership in specific forms of ministry,” and that “ordination itself is ultimately the work of the Holy Spirit.” When a bishop presents licenses to local pastors, the church declares that “we have inquired diligently concerning him and have found him to be fit for this sacred vocation,” asks the candidate, “Do you believe you are moved by the Holy Spirit to serve as a local pastor?”, and then prays that God will “prepare him in body, mind, and spirit for his task, and continue him in your grace.” At a commissioning the bishop lays on hands and prays, “Pour out your Holy Spirit upon Full Name. Send him now to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ.”

None of that is vague. It is confident, specific, and unembarrassed about divine action. The church that cannot say what an elder is turns out to be perfectly able to say it, at the altar, in the hearing of the whole conference, several times a year.

So the problem is not that we lack a theology of ordination. We have one, and it is in our prayers. The problem is that it has never been allowed to govern anything else. Our law does not follow from it, our credentialing does not reflect it, our examinations have been trimmed away from it, and our explanatory documents write as though it were not there. The oldest rule in Christian theology is that the church believes what it prays. We have arranged things so that the church prays one doctrine of ministry and administers another.

That is what this document is about, and it sets the task. The work here is less a matter of supplying something missing than of holding the prayer book open beside the Discipline and asking why they do not match.

There are two directions a doctrine of ministry can run, and everything depends on which one we choose.

The first runs upward from practice. It begins with the arrangements we have (three tracks, four categories of authorization, a licensing system, an itinerant career with a guaranteed appointment at the end of it) and looks for theological language adequate to bless them. This is the direction most of our recent work has run, and it is not the product of bad faith. It is what happens when a church is under pressure to explain itself quickly. But the results are predictable. Because the arrangements came first, the theology arrives as vocabulary rather than as argument: words like covenant, apostolic, and sacred trust, laid over structures whose actual justification is that we already have them. Ask such an account why the licensed local pastor may preside within the charge and not beyond it, and it will answer with a need. Ask why the elder alone itinerates, and it will answer with a history. Neither answer is about God.

The second direction runs downward from God. It begins with who God is and what God does, asks what kind of creature a human being is such that God can call one, and only then asks what an office in Christ’s church could be, what the several offices are, and what practices follow. On this account, the arrangements are not the foundation. They are the last thing considered, and they stand under judgment rather than under description.

This document takes the second direction, and it does so for a reason that is itself theological. In the tradition we have received from Wesley, the doctrine of God is generative. Wesley did not hold his doctrine of providence beside his doctrine of God as a compatible opinion; he held it because of what he believed about divine omnipresence and omniscience. He did not defend Christian perfection as a separate enthusiasm; he defended it because a ceiling on what God can do in a human life is a claim about a deficiency in God. His convictions about the human person, about liberty, about the invisible world, all radiate from one center. If that is how the rest of Methodist doctrine works, then a doctrine of orders that cannot be derived from who God is and what a human being is has no claim to be doctrine at all. It is a personnel policy with a liturgy attached.

This is not a petition, and it does not propose legislation. It is a study document, which means its work is to make certain questions impossible to keep avoiding. On the hardest of them, i.e. what the church should finally do about licensing, it will set out the honest alternatives with as much force as I can give each, and it will decline to choose. That restraint is deliberate. The choice belongs to the church, and a church that has never had the question put to it clearly cannot be said to have chosen at all.

Neither is it a departure from what United Methodists have already agreed. Two adopted teaching documents stand behind this one. By Water and the Spirit (1996) says that ordination is “grounded in the same baptism that commissions the general priesthood of all believers,” and divides the action with care: “God calls and the church authorizes.” This Holy Mystery (2004) says that “God calls and the church sets apart certain people for leadership,” and that “the Holy Spirit gives to such people the grace and gifts they need for leadership in obedience to their call.” Both sentences are exactly right, and this document is in large part an attempt to take them seriously enough to build on them.

This Holy Mystery does something else as well, which is the immediate warrant for the work that follows. Having listed everyone the Discipline authorizes to preside at Holy Communion, and having explained honestly that these provisions exist so that small congregations without elders can receive the sacrament, it says this:

The church continues to seek the best ways to meet this need and still uphold the historic linkage of ordination and administration of the sacraments.

That sentence was adopted by the General Conference in 2004 and has never been withdrawn. It is the church’s own admission that the question is open. More than twenty years later, we have added provisions, extended authorizations, and grown more dependent on the ministry it describes, and we have not answered it. What follows is offered as one attempt at the answer the church said it was still seeking.

A word about sources. Scripture comes first, and the argument stands or falls on whether it is reading Scripture rightly. Wesley appears throughout, not as a mascot but because his sermons and conference minutes contain the sharpest Methodist thinking about what a call is and how a church tests one. Our services of ordination, commissioning, and licensing are treated here as primary theological texts rather than as ceremony, for the reason just given. The Book of Discipline appears late and in a particular role: this document does not build on the Discipline, it examines it. Where the Discipline’s language is genuinely theological, and in places it is, I say so gladly. Where a paragraph that governs sacramental ministry contains no theology at all, I say that too.

Two conventions, so that nothing surprises anyone. Scripture is quoted from the World English Bible unless noted. And in quotations from seventeenth and eighteenth century writers I have modernized the spelling silently, lowered the capitals, and given British forms in their American ones, keeping the wording and the punctuation as they stand. Wesley’s contemporaries wrote Bifhop and Prefbyter, and there is nothing to be gained by making a reader pick through it. Documents still in use are another matter and are quoted exactly as they are printed, so where a modern ecumenical text spells a word its own way, it keeps it.

One source will recur often enough that it deserves a proper introduction rather than a footnote. In 1982, at Lima in Peru, the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches adopted a text called Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, the product of a study process running back to the first Faith and Order Conference of 1927 and of drafting by theologians answerable to churches that disagree with one another about nearly everything in this area: Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, Methodist, Baptist, and more. Over a hundred churches had already returned detailed comments on an earlier draft. The result, usually called the Lima text, is the nearest thing the divided church has to a common statement on baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and ministry, and it is cited throughout the Christian world by its own paragraph numbers.

Two things make it more than a courteous nod for United Methodists. The first is that we have already taken it up: This Holy Mystery quotes the Lima text on the authority of the ordained minister and builds on it, which makes its language part of what this church has adopted. The second is simply that it is good, and on several of the questions in this document it says plainly and without embarrassment what we have been reluctant to say for ourselves. Anyone who wants to test the claim that our vagueness about ordination is ecumenical caution should read it. A convergence text answerable to Rome and to Geneva at once turns out to be considerably less shy than we are.

I will also say, because it is true and because it shapes how I read it, that I do not come to that document as a stranger. Geoffrey Wainwright, who worked on it and was proud of it and of its ecumenical claims, was my teacher. I have tried to engage it here with the gratitude that is owed, which includes disagreeing with it in the places where I think our tradition has something to add.

One last thing, since it shapes the tone of everything after it. The people who built the system I am about to examine were trying to solve real problems, and mostly they solved them. Congregations that would have gone without the sacrament received it. Faithful people who could not have gone to seminary were given a way to answer a call. The critique here is not aimed at their motives or their competence. It is aimed at what happens to a church that solves problems for fifty years without ever going back to ask what its solutions mean. That is a failure of theological nerve, and it is the more painful because the resources for repairing it have been in our hands the whole time.