Modern Ministries May Redirect Paths to Ordination
Episcopal News Service. April 29, 1991 [91114]
Julie A. Wortman, Newswriter with Episcopal Life
When a mob of Christians in Milan elected Ambrose their bishop in A.D. 373, they only had to baptize him before he could be ordained.
Today, in addition to being baptized, Ambrose would have to be ordained to both the diaconate and the priesthood before he could even be considered a candidate for bishop.
But that may change because the church is rethinking why and how it ordains its ministers. The 70th General Convention, meeting in Phoenix this summer, will be considering three resolutions that urge a return to the ordination practices of the early church because those practices more closely reflect modern trends in ministry.
Increasingly, hard economic times are forcing dioceses and congregations to pool resources and develop models of ministry that depend less on imported, seminary-trained clergy and more on shared, nonsalaried, local efforts.
The training and ordination of local leaders to serve as priests has been one important way to meet the need, especially in rural dioceses with small, far-flung congregations. Another has been a revival in the order of deacons, who are not on the church's payroll but who have been ordained to servant ministry.
"I don't know what we'd do without the deacons we have," said the Rev. Canon David McCallum, chairman of the Diocese of Eau Claire's Commission on Ministry. "They are the salvation of many small places."
But there has been growing sentiment that the church's canons governing ordinations undermine, rather than support, the goal of a wider sharing of ministry because those canons suggest that distinctive ministry roles are more like rungs on a corporate ladder than special gifts of the spirit.
Last year, the Diocese of Northern Michigan's Bishop Thomas Ray took a new approach to shared ministry. He began using the canons that allow ordination of local leaders as priests and deacons in their congregations and communities. Ray ordained teams of lay people, deacons, and priests, each with five to eight members, charged with sharing responsibility for local congregations.
Those ordained to clerical roles received the laying on of hands in accordance with the ordination liturgy; those commissioned as ministers in lay capacities received the laying on of hands as a reaffirmation of baptismal vows. Having trained together and taken the ordination exam together, the groups then began ministering together, leading worship, visiting the sick or housebound, and responding to community needs.
According to the Rev. James Kelsey, diocesan coordinator for ministry development, the one thing that detracts from these groups' identities as ministry teams is that the national canons require that those who are to serve as local priests be ordained to the diaconate first, making a separate ordination service necessary for them.
Delegates to Northern Michigan's diocesan convention last October voted to challenge this requirement by unanimously passing a resolution calling on the General Convention to change the church's canons to allow for direct ordinations of local priests and -- shades of Ambrose -- even of bishops.
In the Western church, canons have required successive ordinations since the 11th century. They express a tiered understanding of the ordained ministry in which bishops, having "progressed" from being lay persons to deacons and then to priests, are the fullest expression of the church's ministry. Explaining his diocese's objection to the church's customary practice, Kelsey said, "We see our ordained people as icons or animators of the ministry we all share, and we make a great effort to ordain people by how what they already do empowers others."
But across the Wisconsin border in the Diocese of Eau Claire, where the congregations are also small and far-flung and often short of funds, there is strong opposition to the idea of changing the canons.
"We are part of a much larger whole -- this change would run contrary to the practice of the larger church and shouldn't be gone at alone," said Eau Claire's McCallum.
While the practical problems in Eau Claire are much the same as those faced by Northern Michigan, the focus there is on the role deacons can play in bolstering local congregations rather than on ordaining local clergy or ministry teams.
Vocational deacons can be seen as part of the traditional hierarchy of deacons, priests, and bishops, McCallum said, but they are also important role models for the laity because as nonsalaried clergy they bridge the gap between lay and ordained.
Yet, while deacons are readily identified with the "servant ministry" to which all the baptized are called, they have also assumed an increasingly prominent and provocative role in calling congregations to be involved "in works of mercy and justice," as the Diocese of Minnesota's Commission on Ministry has put it.
"Many deacons have a prophetic role of calling attention to things people don't want to hear," said the Rev. Edwin Hallenbeck, a deacon serving in Rhode Island and president-elect of the 800-member North American Association for the Diaconate. "Priests in parishes are not usually very good at that."
Some supporters of a strong diaconate feel, like the people of Northern Michigan, that eliminating the requirement for sequential ordinations, so that people pursuing ordination to the priesthood do not have to be ordained first as deacons, is the only way to express and affirm the distinctive traits of each order.
To that end, a resolution from the Diocese of Pittsburgh asking that diocesan bishops be given the option of ordaining candidates to the priesthood directly, and one from Minnesota that calls for the elimination of the transitional diaconate, will be considered by General Convention this summer.
According to one of the sponsors of the Pittsburgh resolution, the Rev. Elizabeth Rodewald, herself a deacon, a number of priests objected to the resolution because they valued the time priests spend as transitional deacons.
"But those people were never really deacons," Rodewald insisted. "They are the 'PITs' -- priests-in-training -- and it's not the same thing."
Deacons themselves are divided on whether the transitional diaconate should be eliminated, Hallenbeck said, noting that his group has been talking about the issue for several years.
But if there is disagreement about how best to reflect the growing trend toward shared but distinctive, nonsalaried, local ministries in the canons of the church, there also seems to be widespread agreement on what matters the most, just as there was in Ambrose's time.
"The valid ministry of each of us comes from our baptismal vows," said Deacon Rodewald. "I am ordered to be there to help [the nonordained] by constantly reminding them of the covenant they've made."