The theological and liturgical recovery of the importance of baptism and eucharist, described above as a major accomplishment of twentieth century Christianity, has found expression in a mission-centered theology of ministry. This theology emphasizes the body of all baptized people working together in a reconciling and liberating mission in the world God loves (Luke 4:18; John 3:16). The baptized live under Christ’s authority, accountable to God, and empowered by the Holy Spirit to bring the good news into the broken heart of God’s creation. We are an apostolic or “sent” community. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary defines the term ministry, in common usage, as carrying out a charge on behalf of the body or the individual that assigns the office or responsibility in question; a minister acts as an executive agent. We can therefore speak of the church’s mission only because God has a mission: to reconcile the world, drawing all creation ever deeper into the divine life of the Triune God.
Jesus constantly spoke of God’s mission using kingdom language. In the four gospels, Jesus refers to the kingdom more than 150 times. By comparison, Jesus speaks of the “church” only five times (and only then in the Gospel of Matthew). When he began his public ministry, Jesus proclaimed his ministry inaugurated the long anticipated arrival of God’s kingdom (Luke 4:16-22). He instructed the disciples to pray for the kingdom’s fullness to be revealed on earth. If Jesus’ own teaching so centered on the kingdom, then our understanding of the kingdom has important implications for mission and ministry.
We often speak of ministry “in the church” or “in the world.” Yet Jesus teaches us to “seek first God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness.” The kingdom is the good news at the heart of the apostolic mission (Matthew 10:5-8). It is sometimes hidden and elusive; sometimes powerful and revealed. God’s kingdom serves to measure the world, human history, the church and all its ministries. Neither the world nor the church (as an institution) is co-terminus with the kingdom—except insofar as the church lives into its identity as the body of Christ.
An apostolic community, those sent into the world as witnesses to God’s kingdom, requires that disciples or agents (“ministers”) of Christ be transformed by and through the Holy Spirit. For the work of transformation, the community is gathered and plunged into the Paschal Mystery of death and resurrection in baptism and eucharist. There, the ultimate change intended by God may occur: believers are transformed into the likeness of Christ to continue God’s work in the world. A baptismal and eucharistic ecclesiology places the gathered church in the wider context of mission. Transformation and growth in discipleship are not ends in themselves, but through sacramental promise, God’s people are changed so they may announce the good news of the kingdom and serve humankind.
Even a generation ago, Episcopalians might not have recognized this as ministry. Ministry was the work of a minister, a Father, who baptized and blessed, married and buried, visited the sick, preached, and led the Sunday service (usually Morning Prayer). Laity were expected to follow the Ten Commandments, submit to spiritual authorities, attend worship on Sunday, christen and raise their children in the faith, and give financially to the church. Holy Communion seemed to many a privatized affair for the “continual strengthening and refreshing” of the individual’s soul. This understanding of ministry was reflected in the Catechism (“Offices of Instruction”) of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, where the “bounden duty” of church membership consisted in following Christ, attending worship and “to work and pray and give for the spread of his kingdom.”
The kingdom implications of the earlier catechism were brought center stage in the 1979 book. The explicit shift to a baptismal and eucharistic ecclesiology is evident in the new set of questions in the Catechism that replaces definitions of individual duty:
Q. What is the mission of the Church?
A. The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.
Q. How does the Church pursue its mission?
A. The Church pursues its mission as it prays and worships, proclaims the Gospel, and promotes justice, peace and love.
Q. Through whom does the Church carry out its mission?
A. The Church carries out its mission through the ministry of all its members.
This statement of God’s reconciling mission to the world has challenged the Episcopal Church, calling us to discover new ways of understanding ourselves and our congregations as messengers and ministers of God’s kingdom.
This challenge has sometimes led to conflicting expectations regarding the nature and practice of ministry (on the part of both congregants and clergy). Episcopalians often articulate divergent visions of God’s kingdom, mission, ministry, church, and discipleship. While the sharpened focus of our liturgical theology has furnished the church with much creative ferment in the last twenty years, it has also resulted in some confusion. As William Countryman observed:
“Ministry” . . . stands in the midst of a complex constellation of ideas, hopes, tensions, beliefs and norms among Christians today. The ministry of the laity is often contrasted with the ministry of the ordained . . . The whole purpose of ordination in a world that has become more democratic may not be obvious. Churches often have trouble defining exactly what they see as the responsibilities of the ordained. Lay people are equally uncertain about their own role.[1]
In addition to the church’s internal changes, Episcopalians are being challenged by larger cultural shifts. Since the end of World War II, an increasingly racially and religiously diverse United States has attempted to come to terms with vast technological change, radical democratization (with its attendant insistence on human rights and the rights of all nature), and a global economy. We live in the “birth pangs” of a new era. And not unlike the struggles Anglicans faced with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we find our entire understanding of church and ministry challenged by the stresses of massive social innovation.
We are called to understand ourselves as a people under Christ’s authority for mission. Yet the traditional renderings of that authority are enfeebled in a rapidly changing world.[2] Thus, the historic ways in which Episcopalians understood spiritual authority (its basis, nature, and structure) are being challenged along with everything else. We find ourselves arguing over the reliability of familiar guideposts: What combination of scripture, tradition, and reason will inform our course? What roles do our traditional leaders—deacons, priests, and bishops—play in our congregations? What, indeed, is the nature of spiritual authority and leadership? How do we discern God in our midst?
A twenty-year period of numerical decline in our church—and other mainline denominations—has exacerbated uncertainty and institutional anxiety.[3] Worry over survival has sometimes produced beleaguered congregations enmeshed in internal problems with little energy or vision to focus on God’s mission. Mobility challenges inherited assumptions about the nature and meaning of the “parish.” Social movements—such as the movements for civil and human rights, feminism, the movement for gay and lesbian rights, and a greater public expression of racial, religious, and ethnic diversity in the United States — challenge us to become truly welcoming and loving communities of discipleship where every person’s dignity is respected. We struggle to address and correct systemic injustices in the institutions of both society and the Episcopal Church. We strain to understand these changes in relation to Christian faith; we strain equally to understand scripture and tradition in relation to the challenges presented by them. In this dizzying context, God still calls a people to minister as the body of Christ. Chaos is no excuse for quiescence. Indeed, uncertainty only heightens the need for the church to engage more deeply and self-consciously in God’s mission.
What, then, is ministry in the Episcopal Church? What does the church look like when the message of God’s kingdom is embodied in the world by disciples who have been drawn together in a life-long process of transformation into the likeness of Christ?
In 1999, the Zacchaeus Project pointed to a theological truism in our community: when the trained clergy (bishops, priests, and deacons) and all baptized persons work together in mutually empowering service in mission, then the church experiences significant success in ministry.[4] In a wide range of theological settings—Anglo-Catholic to total ministry, progressive to evangelical—the Zacchaeus findings echoed oddly similar themes of mutuality, servanthood, respect, and shared ministry. The old dichotomy between “lay” and “ordained” is fading. It is being replaced with a vision of spiritually vital, networked congregations working to forward God’s kingdom consonant with the needs of local communities.[5]
The rise of this new vision need not threaten the essence of Episcopal identity. For the Zacchaeus Project also discerned that these vital congregations do understand themselves as Episcopal—an identity that emerges through being a liturgical people, a community called in and through baptism and eucharist to serve God’s creation. One of the key findings of the Zacchaeus Project was that the locus of Episcopal identity is shifting from being a hierarchically ordered, clerically focussed institution to being a living icon of God’s gracious presence in the local sacramental community for the life of the world. In conversations across the church, members of the Standing Commission heard many sentiments and ideals expressed echoing the Zacchaeus Project findings. The shift may be haltingly, partially, or imperfectly realized, but it seems to be the theological direction for which the church is reaching—or to which the Spirit is pulling us. As was clear from the Zacchaeus findings, such a vision can enliven traditional forms of church organization as well as inspire and support newer ones.
The church’s main challenge is, therefore, to pursue this new theological reality while honoring and redefining the structures, expressions, and practices of ministry in our midst.
[1] William Countryman, Living on the Border of the Holy: Renewing the Priesthood of All (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1999), xii.
[2] This is true for political and economic structures as well as ecclesiastical ones. Again, the comparison with the Industrial Revolution is apt. In the eighteenth-century, the structures of democracy and capitalism emerged to meet the needs of that changing society. It is these eighteenth-century structures that are being challenged to renewal by the new technological and global revolution. Thus, some of the institutional and structural issues with which the church struggles are part of a larger cultural transformation similar in nature and scope to those experienced in the West three hundred years ago.
[3] Most scholars of American religion now refer to the traditional “mainline” as “the historic mainline” or “old line” denominations. Included in this group are Episcopalians, Congregationalists (UCC), Presbyterians (PCUSA), Methodists (UMC), Lutherans (ELCA), American Baptists, and the Disciples of Christ. The causes for this decline have been one of the most debated points in the recent literature of American religious history. In the Episcopal Church, the decline stopped in the early 1990s and membership has held steady for a number of years around 2.5 million. It should also be noted that in spite of the numerical decline, the Zacchaeus Project data identified greater vitality in terms of church attendance and giving in the Episcopal Church in the 1990s than anytime since the 1960s.
[4] In the language of the Zacchaeus Project, “success” was defined as an experience or experiences when the parish felt that “God was with them” or “God was blessing” their life together. It was not defined necessarily as numerical growth or financial success. Many interviewees protested the language of “success” as being too secular—perhaps an indication of the depth of understanding of such theological matters present in the church today.
[5] If mutuality between clergy and lay persons in ministry was identified by the Zacchaeus Project as key for healthy congregations, then two corresponding problems existed in troubled ones: clericalism or laicism. Clericalism is an often discussed problem. An inappropriate sense of clergy authority has led, sadly, to a host of issues regarding abuse and malpractice. The opposite problem, laicism, is less discussed. In the case of an inappropriate sense of lay authority, laity conceive of the church as their “property” and the clergy their “employees.” In such circumstances, lay persons commit abuses as well—undermining clerical ministries, refusing financially to support the church, forcing clergy from positions. In either case, clericalism or laicism, the church becomes a battle ground for power issues and any real sense of the mission of church is lost.
