Task force begins discussion of ordination, starting with biblical, historical background

Gary Demarest, the task force’s co-moderator, said: “We’re pretty close to having laid a lot of groundwork that will enable us now to really get into it.”

This time, the task force members talked about the history and theology of ordination in the church – what the Bible says about it, what Reformed theology teaches, and what the historic practices of Presbyterians regarding ordination have been.

Some of what they learned:

o The Bible doesn’t say much directly about ordination, although it does list qualifications church leaders must have and presents different kinds of ministry to which people are called. The idea of some sort of “ordered ministry” – in the Presbyterian church, that’s ministers, elders and deacons – is drawn from this biblical presentation.

o Scripture does show that being ordained is not about authority and power, but about grace and love. “The model for ministry is Jesus, He’s what it’s all about,” said Loudon, who led the discussion of the biblical view of ordination. God calls some people to ministry – the spiritual gifts are given by God. And Jesus taught that “whoever is great among you must be your servant,” Loudon said. Ministry is not about power, but about being a servant who leads people to deepen their commitment to following Jesus Christ.

• In the Reformed tradition, a call to ministry is not something a person discerns alone – it’s not simply a private thing. The call also must be recognized and affirmed by others.

• The questions asked when a Presbyterian minister or elder is ordained are not set in stone. Demarest, a 78-year-old Californian, said that in his tenure as a minister he’s seen the ordination questions change five times. (And, as an interim minister, he’s been examined by presbyteries five times in the last 10 years).

• The Reformed tradition does not always offer a consistent theology on ordination – what Barbara Wheeler, the president of Auburn Seminary in New York, described as the “dazzlingly clear and compelling” theological view that characterizes the Reformed tradition in some other areas. There are places, task force members acknowledged, where Reformed ideas on ordination don’t always seem to add up.

The task force also acknowledged in their discussion that ordination – the question of who can be and who can’t be, or, as Demarest put it, “who gets into the tent and who’s taking the tickets” – has long been a source of controversy for Presbyterians. “We’ve gone to war,” Loudon said, “over such issues as can women be ordained,” can gays and lesbians, can sexually active single heterosexuals, can people who are divorced?

“Let’s face it,” Loudon said. “The primary reason all of us are here on the task force is because of the ordination issue,” that’s the main reason the Assembly created the task force, and their strong (albeit differing) views on that crucial question was what motivated some of them to agree to serve.

When the task force first met, in December 2001, some of its 20 members wanted to lead off with the ordination issue – among them Demarest, who said his inclination is “when you have a problem, you put your head down and go for it,” either by resolving itt or seeing “who the last one standing is” when the battle’s over.

But Demarest reminded the group how the late Betty Achtemeier, a retired professor who was only able to attend one meeting before she became ill with cancer and later died, said, “No, no, no, if we start there we do nothing but perpetuate the problem.” Betty Achtemeier said they should start off talking about the nature of God.

That gave the task force time, Demarest said, to pore over theology and Presbyterian history, get to know one another, to discover some key theological teachings on which they agreed, and to come together “not to represent constituencies but to try to determine the will of Christ.” That’s rare among Presbyterians, Demarest said – that people who disagree will work to achieve not their own agendas but to discern God’s will. And “I don’t pretend to know the will of Christ in some of these very complex issues,” he said.

At the end of the Dallas meeting, the task force members were invited to describe in a few words each how they’re feeling about the group’s work so far. They used phrases such as hopeful, challenged, overwhelmed, blessed and “enthused in a bewildered sort of way.” Lonnie Oliver, a pastor from Georgia, said: “I’m feeling some healthy anxiety” and “I feel like I’m pregnant.”

Here’s more of what the task force dealt with this time around.

THE BIBLE AND ORDINATION

In some places in the Bible, God clearly selects people to become priests even though the word “ordination” isn’t used to describe it, Loudon said. In the 14th chapter of Genesis, Melchezedek is described as the “priest of the most high God” (Loudon said he’s always considered Melchezedek to be “a fascinating, mysterious and rather shadowy character,” because although no ordination is described, somehow he got the title of priest.)

At one point, Loudon broke task force up into pairs, assigning each a passage of Scripture to read and analyze for what it had to say about ordination.

The eighth chapter of Leviticus describes an elaborate ceremony in which Aaron and his sons are selected to be the line through which the priests of Israel would come. The passage describes “not a casual ritual” but one ‘very carefully spelled out,” with special garments and “a very vivid description of sacrifice,” said Jenny Stoner of Vermont, the task force’s co-moderator (Moses put some of the blood from the ram that was burnt as a sacrifice onto the thumb of Aaron’s right hand and onto the big toe of his right foot). Priests weren’t named by humans but by God – it was a divine appointment, Loudon said. As Stoner put it, there’s “a real sense they’re set apart.”

That’s not to say, however, that only pure, virtuous people were picked for leadership.

The Bible is full of “God’s calling flawed and broken people to places of leadership,” Loudon said. “Remember Jacob, David, Paul, Peter, us.”

That being said, the New Testament also lists in several places qualities that leaders of the church should possess – long and sometimes intimidating lists of attributes. Among other things, leaders are to be sensible, blameless, not greedy, able to keep their children in line.

Loudon said when he reads those pages, he feels like the guy in a Western movie playing cards with Doc Holliday, who throws down his cards and says, “That’s it, I’m out!” He doesn’t think he measures up. “None of us is worthy in and of ourselves,” Loudon said. “We are only made worthy through Christ. We are sinners redeemed by God’s grace,” some of whom are called and gifted for service in ordained ministry to the church. “It’s very humbling,” he said. “It’s an awesome responsibility. We walk in the footsteps of the Savior, the suffering servant,” who gave his life for others.

“It’s not about wielding power,” Loudon said. “It’s about ministry. It’s about servant ministry.”

There’s also the idea, in the 12th chapter of 1 Corinthians, that all members of the church are “automatically leaders,” and that the ministry of the church is interconnected, said John Wilkinson, a pastor from Rochester, N.Y. In the local church, this plays itself out every day, Wilkinson said. Some jobs may be considered more important or prestigious, but the church couldn’t function, he said, without people willing to clean up after the potluck.

THEOLOGY OF ORDINATION

John Calvin, the “premier theologian” of the Presbyterian church, taught that there are two marks of the church: the Word rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered, said Sarah Grace Sanderson-Doughty, a pastor from Lowville, N.Y. The Church of Scotland, the “mother church” of American Presbyterians, added another, she said: ecclesiastical discipline, rightly administered.

Calvin also taught that “believers grow slowly into maturity” and “solely through the education of the church,” Sanderson-Doughty said. While Calvin didn’t consider discipline to be a third mark, he did understand discipline to be essential to equipping and preparing the body to be able to receive Christ through Word and sacrament. And while many Presbyterians today see discipline in terms of “judgment and punishment,” historically it was viewed as mutual accountability, Sanderson-Doughty said – part of the process of maturation into full stature of the followers of Jesus Christ.

While some might think the concept of the “priesthood of all believers” might eliminate the need for any kind of priest or pastor, she said, in Calvin’s view the office was necessary to make sure the children of God were properly nurtured in their faith.

Calvin envisioned there being four permanent offices in the church – two of which centered around teaching – teacher and pastor. Elders and deacons were responsible for making sure the body was fit, ready and able to receive Christ through the exercise of mutual accountability. Other offices – for example, apostles, prophets and evangelists – Calvin considered to be temporary offices, necessary for the establishment of the church but not for its continuity once established (unless they needed to be reinstated along the way, perhaps by bringing prophets back to right a wayward church). Obviously, the Presbyterian Church doesn’t do things exactly the way Calvin described them.

But the Reformed tradition has made several distinctive contributions to the theological understanding of ordination, Sanderson-Doughty said. Among them:

• The collegiality of elders and clergy. In the Presbyterian system, elders and ministers work together to make decisions and exercise discipline in presbyteries and gather together at the General Assembly. The development of “plural, undivided ministries” effectively removed the hierarchy which once ranked believers, Sanderson-Doughty said. (Frances Taylor Gench, who teaches New Testament at Union Seminary/Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond described this as “anticlericalism.”) Some also pointed out, however, that sense of equality has only gone so far at certain times. For example, women were permitted to be deacons in the Presbyterian Church long before they were allowed to be elders or ministers.

• Calvin preferred a “consistent shunning of individual authority,” Sanderson-Doughty said – placing decisions in the hands of representative groups rather than giving them to one person with concentrated authority.

• Calvin transformed the office of deacon into a permanent office of care for the poor and the sick. In the Roman Catholic church at that time, being a deacon was seen as a step along the road to the priesthood, and deacons fulfilled primarily liturgical functions.

• Calvin had “remarkably little to say” about ordination standards, Sanderson-Doughty said. But he did distinguish between an inner and an outer call, both of which he saw as necessary for ordained ministry. An “inner” call would be a “private awareness between an individual and God,” an awareness of spiritual gifts which can’t be regulated in any way, she said. But Calvin placed a real emphasis on the “outer” call – that the broader church must also sense God’s call to ministry for it to be valid. The early church engaged in fasting and prayer when choosing presbyters, showing the highest reverence and care, Sanderson-Doughty said.

PRESBYTERIAN PRACTICE OF ORDINATION

Demarest, who taught polity in at the seminary level for 20 years, traced the development of the ordination vows in both the southern and northern streams of American Presbyterianism – and found there have been considerable shifts through the years. At the same time, however, there are consistencies as well: the fundamentals of the vows from 1788 are still included in the ordination vows today, Demarest said.

One of the major shifts, he said, came with the adoption of a Book of Confessions – which Demarest described as a huge cultural shift for the Presbyterian church and one which today still raises the question of “Do we have a common confession?” Wheeler, however, pointed out that history shows – for example, the Old-School-New School battles of the 1800s – that the Presbyterian Church “was capable of deep and bitter theological division when we had only one confession.”

• Does the PC(USA) expect its ordained officers to be “better” people than its members are? Scott Anderson, executive director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches, asked that question – and also wondered, if that’s true, how the Reformed doctrine of sin enters into the discussion. Reformed theology teaches that all have sinned, all fall short of the glory of God. “If we are all sinners, what makes you better than me? Or makes me better than you?” asked José Luis Torres-Milán, a pastor from Puerto Rico. Should ordained officers be expected to be more mature Christians?

• What happens when a congregation or middle governing body essentially writes its own rules – if they alter or disregard the ordination vows? William Stacy Johnson, who teaches systematic theology at Princeton Seminary, said he’s concerned about the “integrity” issue involved in that. Johnson said he’s heard liberals say to those considering leaving the PC(USA), “How dare you threaten to break fellowship?” But altering the ordination vows “is a breaking of fellowship, and it’s an integrity issue,” Johnson said. (There’s also a hidden integrity issue, he said – the suspicion in some cases “that maybe when I said my vows, I didn’t really mean it.”)

• Why, in the Presbyterian Church, is ordination and homosexuality the driving issue? The Episcopal church, for example, has gay priests – but it’s the appointment of a gay bishop, not the ordaining of gay priests, that’s caused so much controversy for Episcopalians, Wilkinson said. Achtemeier asked at one point – somewhat in jest – “What about the ordination of drinkers?” Loudon said in the church in which he grew up, those who drank alcohol in fact couldn’t be ordained as elders – and that’s certainly not the rule in the PC(USA) now. Why has the ordination of gay and lesbians become such a flashpoint for the PC(USA)?