When the store or online retailer cancels your order, what do you do? You reorder the item there or elsewhere. When graduating seniors seated in alphabetical order fall out of sequence, the monitors do their best to reorder them. When the ministry ordained and structured by God goes awry, ecclesiastical leaders reorder the company of leaders.
Given the awkward way that divine inspiration and intentions mix with the ever-creative ways human agents prove to be so undivine, the need to reorder ministries has always been with us. So last Sunday, when floating in the neighborhood pool and conversing with a young adult Baptist singing the praises of his pastor’s sermon, we got to talking about the way his pastor does his work versus how we Presbyterians do ours.
“The pastor casts the vision, and the people support it,” he said as if that was a formula deeply inscribed in the cerebral cortex. “Doesn’t work that way for us Presbyterian pastors,” I chimed in. “We have just one vote among a board of elders.”
“It’s that way with us, actually,” he assured. In fact, he reminded me of how easy it is to fire his preacher if the congregation chooses to call for a vote of no confidence. “Even still,” I said, “your words about casting the vision are pretty much what I hear from Baptists everywhere.”
While criticisms circulate about our brand of Christian expression, one thing that always makes me feel good about being Presbyterian is the way we order our ministries. Unlike the vision-casting authority afforded the Baptist-congregationalist pastors and the clergy-dominated control entrusted to the hierarchical episcopacy of Roman and Anglican and Wesleyan brands, we Presbyterians learned the meaning of the word “accountability” about 500 years before it became a stylish buzzword for those other groups.
One downside of our system of ordering authority in sessions and presbyteries is that we often squelch the most creative gifts of our most gifted leaders. That supposedly is one reason that so many major para-church, multidenominational ministries have been led by great Presbyterians willing to test the edges and expand the bounds beyond typical parish service.
Still for most of us, the mutual sharing of ecclesiastical authority between clerically trained preaching scholars and secularly and home educated-andapprenticed workers has had the salutary effect of helping keep one another honest and empowered and teachable and balanced and reflective and humble and engaged. Our approach was forming us into teams long before Harvard Business School and marching band directors and Marxist socialists dubbed themselves the pioneers of such collective efforts.
So we’ve bounced around different ways of labelling ourselves: pastors, elders, ruling elders, teaching elders, deacons, ministers, bishops, shepherds. But we typically use the plural forms of such labels because we form visions together, we organize programs together, we teach classes together, we pray for the sick and worship the Lord and nurture the children and feed the hungry and build medical clinics and march against injustice … all together.
We long ago gave up the idea that we’d ever be single-minded. Sure we tried that approach. But it stifled creativity, promoted mediocrity, required conformity and just got boring. Instead, we opted for the diversity of ideas and personalities that far more faithfully has reflected and promoted the God who is too interesting to be formulated and freeze-dried and vacuum-packed and carried around in a pocketbook or satchel.
Put this all together and our work is cut out for us. Our sometimes prickly personalities and sometimes inappropriate humor and sometimes unsynchronized mood states make our work together a tough task. And our disagreements can incite riots or simply leave us shaking our heads in dismay.
Can we do better? Absolutely. And always. Is there a better alternative than the one we’ve got? Not that I know of. I’m glad to be reordering this thing of ministry with the likes of you.
—JHH
