The Long Road to Ordination

What if the biggest obstacle in responding to God's call to ordained ministry turned out to be the church itself?

And what if, with the very best of intentions, the church was ironically hampering its own witness and compromising its own future in the way it had laid out the path to ordination?

For a lot of candidates for ordination in the United Methodist Church, this worst case scenario seems anything but far-fetched. I've heard scores of stories over the past few years about the difficulty of pursuing ordination as an elder or deacon in the UMC.

I am convinced the ordination process can be reformed. And the change that have been made in the past couple of years only reinforce that conviction.

In my current column in the UM Reporter, I look at reform of ordination candidacy in two forms: the need for a change in structure and the need for a change in personal attitudes.

The willingness to change our structure - as outlined in the Book of Discipline - seems to finally be underway. Last year's General Conference legislated a number of long-needed changes, some of which I mention in the column. There are more changes that need to be made, and it's my hope that the 2012 General Conference will continue that crucial work.

The willingness to change attitudes (which I'll look at in the next column) is no less needed but also a bit more difficult. We've allowed ourselves to shift focus from people to process, a move that largely reflects the wider culture's growing belief that virtues of bureaucracy. But layers of organization and piles of paperwork cannot do the very human work of discernment, and the Holy Spirit doesn't work as well through standardized tests and surveys as he does through personal mentoring relationships.

I know a lot of this blog's readers have personal experience with the UM ordination process. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on what is needed the most to improve our ordination candidacy.

Also, here are some other ordination-related articles and posts I've done in the past:

"Can't we simplify" (UM Reporter, September 9, 2009)

"Reflections on the ordination process" (blog post, July 9, 2008)

"The devil's in the details with ordination process" (UM Reporter, October 3, 2007)

"Ordination problems ... uh, process" (blog post, August 15, 2007)

Unfortunate, self-inflicted confusion

About the orders of ministry, that is.

If you have time, read this United Methodist News Service report along with this blog post. It explains the 2008 General Conference's decision to allow deacons, with their bishops' permission, to preside over the sacraments within the deacon's primary appointment.

Why is this a problem? Well, because historically deacons do not celebrate the sacraments. Whether they are "transitional" deacons meaning they are on their way to becoming elders (as in the UMC prior to 1996 and in many denominations today) or "permanent" deacons (as in both Roman Catholic and United Methodist practice in the present), the ministry of deacons has never been understood to encompass celebrating the sacraments.

Deacons have an important calling. As the Book of Discipline (2000) makes clear in Par.310, the deacon is called to servant ministry in the world, embodying "the interrelationship between worship in the gathered community and service to God in the world." Thus, you'll find deacons who are teachers, social workers, chaplains, youth ministers, music ministers, and activists.

Elders (or presbyters, priests, pastors, etc.) have a different calling. They are called as the shepherds of congregations of the faithful, leading them through teaching, preaching, guiding, and worshiping. And so it is to the elders of the church that the responsibility for celebrating the sacraments falls.

Note: this does not imply a superiority on the part of elders. Elders are not 'better' than deacons, just as the ordained clergy (elders and deacons) are not 'better' than laity. But all these categories have different callings as Christian disciples, callings which are derived from Scripture and the tradition of the church. And importantly for our purposes, they are callings that the UMC has spent a lot of time trying to reason through over the past few years.

It was the 1996 General Conference that separated the orders of ministry, defining the elder and the deacon as two distinct ordinations and phasing out the 'transitional' deacon. The GC made this move because it believed that it was faithfully Scriptural and that it provided for a more coherent account of the orders of ministry. Yet with the 2008 General Conference's decision to authorize bishops to allow deacons to celebrate sacraments in their primary appointments, it has begun to overturn what was developed 12 years prior.

From what I understand, the ostensible reason for the 2008 GC's action was to allow for the sacraments to be celebrated in areas where elders are not readily available. But does this mean that deacons will be serving as the pastoral leaders of congregations? That really makes no sense. If deacons are leading worship because they feel called to do so, then they should begin the process to be ordained as elders. And if there are still truly rural outposts out there without an elder for miles around, then surely our tradition has enough historical knowledge about how to circuit ride that we can get an elder to each local church on a regular basis.

I spoke with a young woman earlier this year who is a seminarian and (I believe) wants to be ordained a deacon. In arguing that deacons should be granted sacramental authority, she said something to the effect, "I have friends who are called to be deacons, but they also feel called to celebrate the sacraments."

The proper response to a statement like this is "No, actually your friends are mistaken. They cannot be called to be both deacons and celebrants. In the church's understanding, if they are called to preside at table, then they are called to the pastoral leadership of congregations. If, on the other hand, they are called to the servant leadership of a deacon, then our understanding of that does not include pastoral leadership."

Sacramental authority is not a commodity, to be claimed by those attracted to the stature it conveys and offered in a consumerist manner when and where one pleases. It is a means of grace, given to us by Christ and provided for our salvation. One of the chief reasons that the presbyteros exist at all is to safeguard the sacred mysteries, ensuring that they are taught faithfully and celebrated rightly. And when we go tinkering with the orders of ministry at each and every General Conference, we do violence to the ecclesial covenant God has given us and introduce unnecessary incoherence into our orders of ministry.

As they have always been, the bishops of the church are the last line of defense for orthodoxy. Let us hope each one of them declines to use the new authority that the General Conference recently offered them.

Do we need a new clergy order?

Tom Arthur, a student at Duke Divinity School, is proposing a new order for clergy, which would be called the Order of St. James. You can see his post about it here. As a way to respond to the rampant materialism of our age, this order would covenant around the practices of simplicity and hospitality. The group Tom is gathering has devoted an entire blog to their ongoing conversations, and they are beginning a process of discernment about intentional practices in which the order will engage.

I think the issue that Tom and this group are pressing is an important one. In more and more interactions that I have with other clergy, the need to covenant around something deeper than just our common ordination vows often comes up. The reasons for this are many: For one thing, the level of accountability both in ministry and in the church as a whole is extremely low. For another, the very issue that this nascent Order of St. James is responding to - materialism - is so pervasive in the culture that it is sometimes hard to even see. When everything around us is devoted to mammon, it makes it difficult to remember how deceptively idolatrous mammon can be.

One other reason an order would be helpful is that it's becoming less and less clear what the mission of the church truly is. Many Christians - and I include Methodists here - don't take salvation very seriously. We've become soft universalists, assuming that our choices have no real bearing on whether or not we are saved eternally. In that milieu, a rededication by the clergy to living and preaching according to the gospel is desperately needed.

When I was in Nashville, some close friends and I entered into a process of discernment over whether to move toward living in an intentional community of some kind. We had lived and studied together in divinity school for a couple of years, and a number of us had been active in an anti-death penalty movement where we experienced a special call from the Holy Spirit. The text we kept coming back to was John 13:34, where Jesus gives a mandatum novum, a new commandment, that the disciples should love one another as they had been loved by Christ himself. Most of us were headed toward ordained ministry, and at some point the conversation came around to whether we should found an Order of the Mandatum, whose members would covenant to live in intentional communities and engage in certain biblical practices.

More recently, I have talked with friends here at Duke about an Ordo Missionis Wesleyani, an Order of the Wesleyan Mission, which would essentially be a preaching order for Methodist clergy. Its members would commit themselves to faithfully preaching the "three grand doctrines" of Scripture that Wesley said were indispensable: Original Sin, Justification by Faith, and the Holiness consequent upon that justification. Though such a doctrinal orientation might at first seem very different from either the Order of St. James or the Order of the Mandatum, it's not. When you understand what Wesley really meant by holiness, it becomes clear that doctrine and practice are twin sides of the same coin.

I will say that I think this stuff is much harder than it might at first appear. The Order of the Mandatum floundered, due largely to competing understandings of how it should be constituted and diverging desires on where to live and what to do. That group read Jean Vanier's Community and Growth together (a book that I highly recommend anyone read who has an interest in either a religious order or an intentional community), and I was struck at Vanier's comment that any group of people who have an idea of what a community will look like before it is actually formed are setting themselves up for failure. As I remember it, Vanier suggests that such an approach shows a lack of faith in the Holy Spirit's ability to shape and form communities according to God's desires. That, I think, was what my Mandatum friends and I did wrong. I would be curious to hear from anyone who is in the Order of St. Luke or who is a part of an annual conference where the Order of Elders and Order of Deacons are taken seriously.

The problem we American individualists have in terms of really entering into an order is that we can't really submit to the ancient monastic vow of obedience. We are too committed to making our own decisions and living our own lives. And yet, it is that very quality of obedience that we most need to learn. If the church is to have a future in this land, it will be through a renewed obedience to God rather than the superficial triage techniques that you see lining the bookshelves of Christian bookstores. "Church growth" is not the church's salvation.

An order for preachers, to guide their lives and help them better pastor the flocks God has given them ... Is it needed? Desperately so. Is it possible? For us? For Methodist elders and deacons? I don't know. But I'd like to find out.