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Ordination to Daily Mission
In June of 1958, Gordon Cosby from the Church of the Savior was invited to participate in and to address a meeting of ministers held in Geneva, Switzerland. The subject was "world evangelism," and the following is an excerpt from his talk.
Each person is called to ministry…
One order of ministry is not eternally more valuable than another. It is easy to absolutize the significance of one type of ministry and leave the feeling with many that they are second class members of the body, important only as extensions of official clergy. This I cannot accept. One psychological reason for this may be the minister's inability to be one among a number of equally significant ministers. He may need to be the center of a revolving constellation. He may find it difficult to decrease while another increases. On the other hand, the layman may not really want the responsibility involved in an ordination as a lay minister of Christ and His church.
Of greatest importance is our own attitude…. Do we believe that the people in our congregation are as vital to the life of the Body as we are? Do we give lip service to the concept of the ministry of all believers while being seriously threatened by the reality of it when these ministries begin to emerge? These are not merely academic questions; there is real threat experienced as the circle of activities in which we excel gets smaller and smaller. Unless we see the ministry of the layman in our world to be as of great a significance as ours, we shall ever be tempted to use him as a lackey in our personal fulfillment.
Although it is not adequately descriptive, in our congregation we speak of the professional minister and the nonprofessional minister. The value of this lies in the eventual acceptance of every member of his status as a minister, usually with the primary thrust of his ministry being in the world. ..
The ordination of a lay person to a ministry in the world is much more than the recognition of significant activity. It means that the person knows him or herself to be grasped by God for a task that only they can do, and which the church must have done. Ordination means that the person's sense of call is confirmed by their own community. The world is a big place and its structures are tough to penetrate. It is good for the nonprofessional minister to discover specifically where he is to exercise his obedience.
The structures of the church must be geared to implementing this conception. This newness will not emerge because we are eager for it to happen. Nor will it come because we preach on the ministry of all believers. These ministries will emerge when the whole congregation is engaging in its ministry in the world and when the whole structure of the congregational life expresses this intention. When the structures thus express such an aim, a person in his first encounter with the church will sense that the church exists as a servant in the world….
Found in Call to Commitment, pp.101-104. Harper and Row, 1963.
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"Historically the church seems to have fallen into a model that eventually developed a sharp distinction between the people themselves (laity) and the professional ministry (clergy), reaching its sharpest expression in the Roman Catholic communion, but finding its way into almost every form of Protestantism as well. The net result has been a church in which the clergy all to often exist apart from the people, for whom there is a different set of rules and different expectations, and a church in which the "gifts" and "ministry", not to mention significance, power structures, and decision making, are the special province of the professionals. Being "ordained" to this profession, the later tend to like the aura that it provides, and having such ordained professionals allows the laity to pay them to do the work of the ministry and thus excuse themselves from their biblical calling." Gordon Fee, "Listening to the Spirit in the Text" p. 123
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One of the qualities of leadership is a willingness to fail and to let others fail. Behind this is the conviction that if God does a new thing through us, we must necessarily be trying that which has not been tried before and there will be no way of knowing the outcome in advance..
Our security focused world needs people who will let come into existence that which might fail. Our job is not to be successful. Our task is to provide structures in which the uniqueness of each of our people can be expressed.
Elizabeth O'Connor, Call to Commitment, p. 90
Following a vision means being willing to go out on a journey to a strange land.
Sometimes we have bewildered non members. Some have asked us as we pondered a new step, "Will the church of the Savior be dissolved?"
We explain that our structures are never static, and that the experiences we are having today enable us to do the next thing, and that what we are doing now will probably be quite different from what we will be doing five years from now. We never have expected to hit upon the final structure. This is important for a church to understand, for when it starts to be the church it will constantly be adventuring out into places where there are no tried and tested ways. If the church in our day has few prophetic voices to sound above the noises of the street, perhaps in large part it is because the pioneering spirit has become foreign to us.
Elizabeth O'Connor, Call to Commitment, p.52
When the old wineskin is dying, the new wineskin is created by people who are not afraid to be vulnerable. Graham Cooke, A Divine Confrontation
"There is no status in the body of Christ." Graham Cooke, A Divine Confrontation
Many people who have lived together for years and whose love for one another has been tested more than once know that the decisive experience in their life was not that they were able to hold together, but that they were held together. That, in fact, we are a community not because we like each other or have a common task, but because we are called together by God.
So we have to create structures which encourage everyone to participate, and especially the shy people. Those who have the most light to shed often dare not show it; they are afraid of appearing stupid. They do not recognize their own gift.. perhaps because others haven't recognized it either.
The more we become people of action and responsibility in our community, the more we must become people of contemplation. If we do not nurture our deep emotional life in prayer hidden in God, if we do not spend time in silence and if we do not know how to take time from the presence of our brothers and sisters, we risk becoming embittered. It is only to the extent that we nurture our own hearts that we can keep interior freedom. People who are hyperactive, fleeing from their deep selves and their wound, become tyrannical and their exercise of responsibility only creates conflict.
From: Community and Growth, Jean Vanier
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• © 1999-2002 Len Hjalmarson.•
Last Updated on May 31, 2002
