THE THEOLOGY OF LOCAL MINISTRY

Introduction

The designation ‘Ordained Local Ministry’ was introduced some years ago in preference to the earlier terms ‘Local Ordained Ministry’ and ‘Local Non-Stipendiary Ministry’. This was in order to emphasise that what is fundamental is Local Ministry, within which OLM is the ordained component. Local Ministry refers to the whole church in a given context as a ministering community (often expressed theologically as ‘the ministry of all the baptized’). This reality is frequently brought into focus and given particular expression through the collaborative ministry of a group or a team of people, often called a ‘Local Ministry Team’, though generally referred to in the Diocese of Wakefield as a ‘Core Group’.  This was chosen as the preferred generic term rather than ‘Local Ministry Team’, because the latter suggests a particular kind of group to which most Core Groups do not conform, i.e. a team of designated people with specified roles who together ‘do the ministry’. While this may be an appropriate model in some (usually small) churches, in most congregations it may be misleading, giving the impression that ‘ministry’ is longer the work of just one person (the ordained) but that of seven or eight (the Team)! Rather than this, Core Groups are there to model what should be true of the whole church, and to foster and stimulate the collaborative ministry of the whole.

It is this collaborative expression of Local Ministry that provides the context within which Ordained Local Ministry is set. This means that OLM is not to be understood as merely an ‘Auxiliary Parish Ministry’, as Non-Stipendiary Ministry was termed in its early days. Ordained Local Ministers are not ‘additional pairs of priestly and diaconal hands’. They are a distinctive, authentically indigenous and essentially collaborative expression of the catholic ministry of the Church. They offer a pattern of priesthood that is not defined by legal or cultural expectations about ‘incumbency’ but which, through the indigenous roots of the OLM (sometimes going back a lifetime) can often exercise a ministry that mediates creatively between church and community and is able to focus the array of lay ministries within the whole congregation as a powerful witness to the whole parish of the ministering work of Christ. 

In what follows in this essay we will explore and examine the underlying theology of Local Ministry in more detail in respect of its ecclesiology and its understanding of ministry, ordination, collaboration and leadership.

Ecclesiology

Ecclesiology for Local Ministry is fundamentally related to an understanding of the mission of God, and hence also to Christology (for God so loved the world, that he sent his Son). God’s mission is the creation (re-creation) of true humanity. This true humanity is revealed and realised in Jesus Christ. The church’s mission in turn is to reveal God in Christ, by making this true humanity visible, modelling it in its own life as the community of disciples of Christ, in process of being made whole. How Christ is proclaimed- evangelism - is not a separate concern, but the living basis of  ecclesiology: how humans in their contemporary world become fully human in relation to God. In this way, ecclesiology unites mission and ministry.

Insofar as the church is a christlike ministering community it is accomplishing the humanizing mission of God. The living Church is recognized by the evidence of the baptized growing into relationship with God and one another, holding and expressing the purposes of God. This means that the objective structures of the church must also bear witness to this. The organization of the church as an institution can only grow out of this sense of the being of the church as the community of disciples united with Christ and enacting and embodying his mission. This means that prescriptions based on hierarchical assumptions are not the best way of determining church structures, however orderly they may appear. The living Church consists in local communities of faith and relevance, recognized as authentic in mission and ministry. A degree of untidiness about this may sometimes be preferable to a perfect ecclesial ordering in which this note of authenticity is lacking.

The church is the community that continually narrates through its common life, its ministry and mission, the Christian story that gives it birth. The witness and service of the church inscribes the text of the Gospel into the hearts and lives of women and men and upon the fabric of the world. It is as Paul tells the Corinthians, that they themselves are ‘a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts’ (2 Corinthians 3:3). This collaborative project of inscribing the Gospel text invites the contribution of all. Each in turn can stimulate others and open up fresh horizons in the unfolding narrative. And there is a powerful interest in working together to do this because there is an end in mind, the overarching and compelling vision of the Kingdom of God as the future of the world.

The work of two of the greatest Roman Catholic theologians of the modern era, Edward Schillebeeckx and Karl Rahner, provides formal theological support to this ecclesiology for Local Ministry.  They offer a significant ‘independent witness’ as they reflect upon a church which has historically given expression to its self-identity in a highly institutionalised and hierarchical form, arguing that this church needs to  rediscover and reaffirm an alternative self-identification through the people (laos) and allow that discovery in turn to reflect back on how the institution is to be understood.  References are from Schillebeeckx, Church, SCM 1990 and Rahner, The Shape of the Church to Come, SPCK and The Catholic Book Club, 1977.

Schillebeeckx takes up the question of how what he calls ‘the mystery of the church’ is historically mediated.  Traditionally, that which guarantees apostolic and catholic authenticity has been located vertically, i.e. within hierarchical institutional order.  In this analysis there is a chain of command for ecclesial truth reaching from pope to bishops and parish priests and only represented within the laity by the duty of obedience.  The church understood in vertical hierarchical order terms is the carrier of the mystery of divine economy, whereas the horizontal reality of the assembly of the people is a socio-historical necessity but not in itself theologically significant.  Thus Schillebeeckx criticises (pp 212-13) ‘the charge that is often heard … that contemporary theologies go too much in their teachings by human sciences and so … think too horizontally and thus overlook the ‘vertical’ mystery of the church’.  On the contrary, ‘The church community as mystery cannot be found behind or above concrete, visible reality.  The church community is to be found in this reality which can be demonstrated here and now’.

Theologically speaking the older view implies that all that needs to be said about ‘church’ and the place of the ecclesial mystery within the purposes of God could be said about the institutional hierarchy alone.  Schillebeeckx wishes to challenge this with a strong reaffirmation of ecclesiology ‘from below’, in which theological truth must be located also in the horizontal reality of the assembly of the faithful, and in such a way that there is freedom here for this level of truth to exercise a judging and reformatory function towards the vertical dimension.  For (p. 196) ‘the indefectibility of the church is … not a static, as it were fixed, essentialist property of the church which could by-pass the constantly precarious, existential faith of the church in obedience to God’s promise.’  Such a view is mistakenly based on ‘the predominance of a christology which forgot the blowing of the Spirit over the lowermost levels of the church and in practice annexed the role of the Holy Spirit through the ministerial succession exclusively for the hierarchy’ (p 198).  By contrast, ‘the foundation of both the authoritative life of the community of faith and ministerial authority within the community of God is the Lordship of Christ in the church through his pneuma or Spirit and the Spirit of the Father’; and ‘essentially it is a matter of the unbroken succession of the apostolic tradition of the gospel content of the faith… this gospel content is the very life of the Christian communities in their local character and communion with one another’ [emphasis mine] (p 216).

Rahner notes that as self-conscious personal commitment to the way of faith is becoming more usual as against an inherited pattern of being ‘born into the Church’, it follows that ‘in future, office-holders will have as much effective authority - not merely a theoretical claim to authority - as is conceded to them freely by believers through their faith’ (p 58). For Rahner this entails a profound affirmation of the priority of the people in community and relationship as the source of understanding of both church and ministry.  In the absence of such a view, ‘the institutional Church will shrivel up into a Church without people’ (p 114) - and as for the people, gathered into small, local ‘basic communities’, ‘the episcopal great Church must not regard them suspiciously as a disturbing element in a bureaucratically functioning organization’!

In this way, Schillebeeckx and Rahner have sought a sustained reconceptualization of church and ministry ‘from below’, which gives a persuasive theological undergirding to the argument of this essay. 

Ministry

The church that is living the mission of God in Christ is a community of ministry because the mission of Jesus was the ministry (service) of the Kingdom of God. The New Testament language of the Body remains a powerful metaphor to depict this. The first outcome of taking this language with full seriousness is that certain attitudes are excluded. Service, not exploitation, coercion or manipulation, characterizes the way of life of Christ’s Body: service- ministry- is the Body’s mode of being, or way of life. The second is that ministry is inevitably pluriform: rather than a community gathered around a minister (or ministers), the Church is called to be a community of ministry. And thirdly, there is no dichotomy between ministry and mission. Such a dichotomy is shown to be false once ministry is recognized as the way of life of the Church per se, both within and beyond the bounds of the worshipping community; mission which is not characterized by ministry cannot be regarded as a truthful expression of the Body’s life.  One of the great needs of the Local Ministry Movement is to convince other sections of the church that it is a Local Mission Movement.

This understanding of ministry as flowing from the mission of Jesus is in turn rooted and grounded back in the missionary nature of God. Trinitarian theology seeks to express a God of dynamic openness to the world: the mutual indwelling or coinherence of the three Persons creates an open communion of diversity in which a generous giving and receiving of love is constitutive of the divine being. This is the fundamental source of the understanding of the mission of God as the creation of true humanness, since the index of such humanness is the cultivation of personhood, which cannot be achieved fully without the acts of charity and service that contribute to the humanization of all. Again, ministry is mission, and fully collaborative in spirit. The life of the Church is entirely a collaborative project, because it is about the formation of persons in relation.

Recent theological thinking has linked inherited patterns of ministry with hierarchical models of society. In these (usually patriarchal), roles and status are defined by locating persons very precisely within a structured system in which relative value attaches to the position occupied vis-a-vis others, i.e. above, below or on a par with but at a distance from them. A metaphysical justification for such an ordering of society has often been supplied by a strongly monarchical and subordinationist doctrine of the Trinity. However, more recent work on the Trinity (drawing on the work of the Cappadocian Fathers) has tended to stress an alternative model in which mutuality, reciprocity and parity of exchange are the defining characteristics. The mutual in-dwelling (circumincessio) or coinherence (perichoresis) of the three Persons creates a communion of diversity in which a generous and gracious giving and receiving of love is identified as constitutive of the divine being. Rublev`s Icon of the Trinity (The Hospitality of Abraham) is often cited in this context as a vivid pictorial insight into this model- the strong, responsive, listening courtesy of the three friends who in being together in perfect distinctiveness achieve perfect unity. This model in turn commends an alternative approach to the theological rationale and practical ethos of ordained ministry, and particularly of the presbyterate.

Ordination

The distinctive role of Christian priesthood is often described by the words set apart. A theology for Local Ministry would question the exclusive use of such a terminology. Why set apart rather than, say, set among or set alongside? It is possible that ‘set apart’ is intended to mean ‘appointed to a specific task’ or ‘for a particular purpose’; but there are other connotations. There is, after all, a whole cluster of related words signifying distance as the defining quality of a relationship between persons or things: apart, over, under, behind, before, etc. By contrast, a different set of words specifies proximity: among, between, amidst, within, alongside. This suggests that the choice of a positional metaphor of distance to locate priest in relation to people is not purely fortuitous: there must be some element of conscious preference here over, say, among. This type of linguistic interrogation reveals the hierarchical assumptions at the heart of much inherited thinking about ordained ministry.

Returning to Schillebeeckx, we find a challenge to this style of thinking in his treatment of the relationship between hierarchical office and the endowment of the Spirit.  He argues that the doctrine of the sovereignty of the Spirit expressed as universal gift for all the baptized and as diversity of gifts for individuals as God determines, must take precedence over the doctrine of particular endowment for apostolic ministry, i.e. ordination within the catholic hierarchy.  Such endowment is a sub-section within the universal endowment of all God’s people rather than the fountainhead from which lay endowment flows.  Schillebeeckx (Church, pp 216-7) claims that in fact ‘talk of church hierarchy in the sense of a pyramidal hierarchical structure of the church community is inspired by the social status symbols of the Graeco-Roman empire…the higher level thus has in a supreme way what the lower level has [only] to a lesser degree and with limited power.’  As a result, the hierarchical principle ‘devalued the pluriform specialized ministries in the church which came into being historically as a result of church needs … in principle the clergy … realized in a perfect way a religious pattern of life … which “ordinary” believers could experience only indirectly and incompletely’. 

Rahner’s way of putting this is to maintain that no hierarchical office may authentically be held without the Spirit, but many have the Spirit who do not hold office.  The authority of office is granted only by the permission of the Spirit-endowed community who acknowledge in the person who takes office the particular endowment to do so.  Ordination is not to be construed as an independent route to spiritual office, i.e. by a form of direct endowment which bypasses the consensual acclaim of the people in recognition of a Spirit-filled life. Thus Rahner can say: … those who love, who are unselfish, who have a prophetic gift in the Church, constitute the real Church and are far from being always identified with the office-holders’ (Shape, pp 56-7).

According to Rahner, the newly developing ministering communities will have ‘the right to be recognised as Church’ and thus to have their ‘community leader recognized by the great Church through ordination’.  It is appropriate for them ‘to present to the bishop a suitable leader coming from their midst’  (p 110: Rahner goes on on pp 110 and 114 to add that such a person need not be expected to remain celibate and could be a woman), whose qualifications for ordination ‘cannot be decided in the light of our ideas of an all-round priestly office-holder who could carry out his duties everywhere’; rather ‘they must be seen as related to this basic community and the requirements to its leadership in the concrete situation.’  Moreover ‘the priest as leader of a local Christian community does not need to be regarded as a mobile state-official who is moved, promoted, acts as representative of a state which confronts a particular group of human beings as an alien factor armed with power, and alone “organises” them’!  Well before its time, this reads as a powerful theological validation of what we now recognise as Ordained Local Ministry.

Collaboration

We have noted above how the church is to be seen as a collaborative project concerned with the formation of persons in relation. Feminist theologians in particular have drawn attention to the concept of relationality as the defining element of personhood, against the Cartesian individualism which dominated Christian philosophical reflection from the Enlightenment onwards. Here too, a challenge is made to hierarchical and patriarchal orders of society. By contrast, writers such as Mary Grey have argued that no individual can achieve status or value in isolation, solely in virtue of occupying a position ‘above’, ‘below’ or otherwise ‘distinct from’ someone else. Rather, persons only attain to authentic value insofar as they are able to flourish in an environment of mutuality; the inter-relating of partially shared stories creates a ripple effect such that, potentially, all humanity is included in it. Thus, as Bishop David Jenkins has said, ‘no-one can be fully human until everyone is fully human’.

Such a model for human flourishing can scarcely demand anything less for the health of the Church and thus also for Christian ministry. The encounter between persons that is non-manipulative, founded on equality of regard and openness of expectation, an encounter full of potential, is a genuine act of ministry. It opens up a creative space in which the Holy Spirit is granted room to move, eliciting growth in grace and faith and hope.  The principle of collaboration may be worked out across the dimensions of the life of the Church, for example in worship, fellowship and learning. Some plangent observations about all of this can be found in the work of Jürgen Moltmann.

In his collection, The Source of Life, SCM 1997, in a fascinating chapter entitled ‘Charismatic Powers of Life’, Moltmann is asking what it is about Pentecostal worship, and speaking with tongues in particular, that is so compelling.  His observation is (p 61): ‘Our services in the mainline Protestant churches in Germany offer a wealth of ideas in their sermons, and have wonderful chorales.  But as far as personal forms of expression go, they are poverty-stricken, and offer no chance whatsoever for spontaneity.’  By contrast, many black Pentecostal congregations experience worship as an energizing and deeply personal articulation of who they are, with one another and with God.  It is an alternative culture, and language and semiotics of worship to that which we have inherited: for example, Moltmann sees speaking with tongues as ‘the beginning through which a powerful experience of the Spirit loosens the tongues of people who have been dumb, so that they can express what moves them so much.’  And ‘these are personal expressions of a personal experience of the Spirit which exalts the people who are touched by it.’

In a different chapter on ‘The Fellowship of the Holy Spirit’, Moltmann identifies the twin movements of ‘gathering’ and ‘dispersal’ as the essentials of the church’s life.  Neither can thrive without the other.  And so what takes place in the ‘gathered’ moments is vital to mission, outreach and service.  Moltmann maintains that ‘the long-standing clericalization of Christianity has deprived people in the church of their maturity and responsibility’ (p 95).  In the case of the gathering for worship, clericalization has stifled initiative and self-awareness of people as ‘church’, effectively quenching the Spirit.  Moltmann therefore says (p 96): ‘If Christianity is to become aware of what it is, we must abandon the pastoral church which takes care of people … instead, we have to call to life a Christian community church … More and more Christians are coming to think it important to take over their own lives, to act on their own responsibility, and to experience life in God’s Spirit for themselves … getting up and saying ‘We are the Church,’ so that they can play a part in determining the form the church takes, and no longer simply say Amen to priestly services and ministrations’.

Moltmann has of course been influenced not only by Pentecostalism but also by the base communities of Latin America, where, through to the experimental ‘cell church’ models now beginning to spring up closer to home, the small group as the prime locus of adult Christian education is universally affirmed.  Behind it there lie a number of basic convictions which are crucial to the church’s vitality as a living and growing organism.  Firstly, spiritual and Christian growth and development is a matter of life-long learning.  Secondly, such learning is not individualistic but takes place within the corporate exchanges of church fellowship life.  Thirdly, the learning process is not one of the top-down delivery of information but consists of reflection upon experience in the light of the shared story (tradition), and vice versa.  Fourthly, the concept of truth which such an educational process is designed to pursue is neither hierarchical nor already fully known, but democratic and eschatological. 

A hierarchical model of truth is one which posits a stream flowing from its ultimate source with God, down through such mediations as Scripture and tradition, to be handled and dispersed by those duly trained and steeped in these resources (in the Roman Catholic Church, the teaching magisterium).  One consequence of this model is that trained experts are needed, not only to facilitate the educational process, but to guard and hand on the educational content.  Another is that the establishment of the truth on a particular matter can legitimately be settled by debate, on the assumption that if contrary cases are presented and arguments urged, the one which is ‘right’ will be determined by people who are sufficiently appraised of the facts and suitably qualified to make judgments.  It follows that those who are not part of the process need only wait for an authoritative pronouncement: ‘the Church ought to give us a lead’!

It is worth at this point being reminded of the position taken by Schillebeeckx in his discussion of ‘Towards Democratic Rule of the Church as a Community of God’  (Church: The Human Story of God, chapter 4) referred to earlier.  The Holy Spirit, he says, is at work ‘generally and specifically in all the people of God and in a specific ministerial way in the official activity of the church leaders’ (p 220). The leaders who hold a teaching office must not overlook what Schillebeeckx terms the various ‘mediations’ of the work of the Spirit, ‘above all the mediation of the structured people of believers themselves, here and now in the stream of time’  (p 221).  Thus ‘the democratic participation of everyone … in a theologically responsible way … must play a role at precisely this level.’  This implies that synodical structures which offer a kind of token representation and access to debate are not enough: only the full recognition of every congregation as a learning community making its contribution to the totality of the quest for, and journey towards, the whole truth of God, will do.

Leadership

Within this collaborative theology of ministry and mission, questions are frequently raised about the leadership role of the ordained. An ordained ministry that is set amidst and among the ministering community, rather than set apart from or over against it as a separate channel of ministerial calling and grace, requires a different understanding of leadership from a hierarchical / institutional model. A comparison of the New Testament lists of spiritual gifts (Romans 12, Ephesians 4, 1 Corinthians 12) with an analysis of ‘team roles’ such as that developed by Meredith Belbin reveals that in neither case is it obvious which role or gifting refers unequivocally to ‘leadership’. Rather, leadership turns out more to be a composite of several roles and skills which will be found at different times and in different contexts distributed among different members of a team or group that is working together. The pronounced interdependence of the members of the Body of Christ raises profound questions about the validity of any notion of leadership which exalts an individual as a single source of vision or director of activities.

A renewed interest in both leadership and collaboration as essential qualities and competences for ordained ministry characterises many recent church publications. The Church of England’s latest proposals for Learning Outcomes for ministerial training require that at completion of Initial Ministerial Education candidates should be able to ‘exercise effective collaborative leadership, working effectively as a member of a team’. Additionally, in order to be licensed to a post of incumbent status they should ‘demonstrate effective collaborative leadership and the ability to exercise this in a position of responsibility’ (Shaping the Future: new patterns of training for lay and ordained, Church House Publishing 2006, p 70).

The Church is also actively promoting the recruitment of leaders with missionary gifts, among which the ability to build and sustain vision is paramount. The Report Mission-Shaped Church (Church House Publishing, 2004) recommended that particular resources be put into the identification, selection and training of ordained ministers with missionary and pioneering gifts: ‘those involved in selection need to be adequately equipped to identify and affirm pioneers and mission entrepreneurs’ (p 147).  In a section headed ‘appropriate local leadership’, the Report warned that ‘if pioneers are to establish work that endures, they quickly need to become team leaders. Many new initiatives begin with a team, and the capacity to lead and develop a team is crucial. There can be a tension between the visionary and the relational, team-building elements of leadership [emphasis mine]. Both elements are essential if the work is to last beyond an initial burst of enthusiasm’ (p 133). The Draft Guidelines for the identification, training and deployment of Ordained Pioneer Ministers, published in late 2005 in consultation with Fresh Expressions, noted that ‘pioneer ministers may well need to develop new patterns of ministerial leadership. Bishops’ Advisers will need to be sure that candidates are self-motivated within a team context and are able to enable and motivate others’; and ‘the ability and desire to work in a team and collaboratively’ is listed as the tenth out of eleven ‘core elements’ to be looked for in such candidates.
All of this material is indicative of a growing recognition of new links in the Church’s thinking between leadership, collaboration and mission. However, the picture is by no means fully formed. Other sources continue to suggest a misunderstanding of the relationship between collaborative practice and the missionary ‘cutting edge’ of a visionary leadership. In his Grove Booklet Visionary Leadership in the Local Church (Cambridge, 1997), the then Director of Anglican Renewal Ministries, John Leach, expressed a reservation about the ‘increasing emphasis in the church recently on leadership teams and collaborative ministry’, because ‘in many cases the leader is the visionary. He or she senses from God what the direction is to be, and then leads the people in that way’ (p 11). Teams are seen as good and desirable, but nevertheless ‘at the end of the day I believe that one overall leader has the authority either to make the vision happen or not’. Recognizing the many ways in which individual clergy leadership has gone wrong, Leach wonders ‘whether the answer to bad leadership is not no leadership but proper leadership…I believe that the church has lost its nerve to high degree over leadership’ (p 18).

If, therefore, we are to put into practice the good intentions of Mission-Shaped Church and Shaping the Future with regard to identifying and training clergy who will exercise leadership in a way that is both missionary (and visionary) and collaborative, we shall need to seek out resources that help us to hold those elements together in a creative synthesis. Collaboration is not an abdication of leadership. For the ordained ministry to handle and facilitate all this requires leadership gifts and skills of a high order, but these are not about ‘top down oversight’.  They might include: the ability to bring people together, to facilitate reflection and elicit understanding, to discern what is going on in a group and enable good decisions to be taken, to stimulate creative and imaginative thinking and encourage people to believe in their own gifts and potential, and to distil discursive discussions into the formulation of agreed policies and strategies. All these are essential, and although expressed here in secular language they are germane to a theological understanding of leadership grounded in the principles outlined in this essay.

In all of these areas, of leadership and collaboration, fresh patterns and understanding of priesthood and ministry, good pioneering work has been done within the Local Ministry movement which is offered to the Church in a spirit of continuing and mutual learning from experience.