So what is priestly/presbyteral ministry? Blog 5 of 7

Blog 5 of 7 - Minister The Priest

Given the priesthood of Christ and the priesthood of all believers explored above, we now consider in what ways the human minister of a church is considered to have a “priesthood”.

To reiterate our earlier point from Hebrews, human priests today cannot be a continuation of the Levitical priesthood, “put in charge of things pertaining to God on their [mortals’] behalf, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins” (Hebrews 5:1). This is good news, as the Levitical priesthood failed to bring perfection and required continual sacrifices. The sacrificial blood used in the covering Aaron and his sons from Leviticus 8, mentioned in the introduction blog post, is replaced with Christ’s sacrifice “once for all … to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Hebrews 9:26). This is just as well; as interviewee A said, when considering whether they were called to the priesthood, a major objection was that “I can’t be good all the time”. Whether or not perpetual goodness is something expected by congregations of their priests, it is certainly not possible for human office-holders, who are neither required nor qualified to offer sacrifices to cover the sins of the rest of us.

The traditional view of the role of priestly ministers in the church has been those with a focus on Word and Sacrament, for example in the Common Worship service of Ordination of Priests:

"[t]hey are to sustain the community of the faithful by the ministry of word and sacrament, that we all may grow into the fullness of Christ and be a living sacrifice acceptable to God."

(Common Worship, Ordination of Priests)

Colloquially, the idea of priests as those who offer sacraments may be known as “Hatch, match and dispatch”, or in the slightly deprecating term “technician of the sanctuary” used by Lewis-Anthony.

In practice however, defining a priest in purely functional terms like this is problematic; anyone who has ever met a priest will know that the role is much broader than this. Maybe word and sacrament are the sine qua non, the necessary but not sufficient, or the essential core of working as a priest, but the activities of preparing sermons and enacting liturgy may not take up more than a fraction of many priests’ time “in the field”. This depends, of course, on the context.

Interviewee D provided a refreshing way to use a traditional starting-point but unpack it into a useful definition of human priestly ministry. When asked how (human) priesthood was to be defined, they took the traditional “ABC” definition of priesthood (Absolution of sins, Blessing of the people, and Consecration at the Eucharist) as a starting-point. They stated that “ABC” on its own was too reductive, communicating little more than the priest’s eucharistic role, but that it should be “fleshed out into the whole of life”, meaning a priest was a “person who offers blessing”, a “little symbol of what the Church is about”, which is “God’s smile on all that God has made.'' This approach is also echoed in Cocksworth and Brown, who dedicate a chapter of their book on priesthood to “Being for Blessing”, and another to “Being for the Other”.

It is hard to define “offering blessing” in non-nebulous terms; there is a risk of falling into the Bernières trap of defining a priest as a meek man with a “weak, theological smile”, offering a vague feel-good factor to all, without any solid philosophical anchor or ethical imperative:

“The composition of sermons was a weekly torment … He wondered if God realised how difficult it was for him to keep making excuses on His behalf.”

(Notwithstanding, Louis de Bernières, p. 122)

Lewis-Anthony refers to such a perception of the priesthood as “The Cult of Nice”.

Yet in Tomlin’s The Widening Circle, we do find a definition of the human minister offering blessing, which seems robust and fits into the wider contexts of church and world. The “widening circles” of the title represent, firstly, humanity which presents creation to God, secondly, the Church which presents humanity to God, and thirdly, human priests who present the Church to God. Ultimately, all those offering others to God are doing so with Christ set before them as the only leader, yet sharing in His leading. For the human priest to offer blessing, they offer the Church, with all its strivings and successes, fears and failures, to God with joy, in the knowledge that they only offer what God Himself has created:

"They are priestly, not in any sense exalted over the Christian community, but called to bring it the divine blessing so that it can be perfected and offered to God as an act of worship."

(The Widening Circle, location 2484 of 2935 (Kindle))

Fortunately, Tomlin further unpacks what this means in practice:

"their primary role is to develop a community of Christians who are themselves politically active and doing what they can to care for their part of Creation. Priests are not meant to bypass the Church, but enable the Church to be itself."

The Widening Circle, location 2484 of 2935 (Kindle)

The idea of fostering the Christian community to itself show God’s love to the world, has a lot of synergy with responses from all interviewees. Interviewee A said that their role was to have time and space to think deeply about strategy and vision, for the people of the church to enact. Interviewee D said that the priest is a focus for the church’s offering of itself at eucharist, both a representative and a member of the body of Christ. For Interviewee D, the incarnation is the key metaphor - they are there to embody Christ, but not uniquely - the calling is to help others to do it. But it was interviewee B who provided the most helpful metaphor for understanding this enabling/leading role of the priest: they saw themselves as a “midwife called to enable the priesthood of believers to become the priesthood of believers”. They got this sense most clearly when the community itself took collective responsibility in the work of the Church.

I found this idea of midwifery a helpful illustration. (Incidentally the same image is also used by Socrates to describe his work as a philosopher, helping men to “give birth to” knowledge by drawing it out from them - see the Theaetetus, Plato). The midwife is a human, caught up in the joys and sadnesses of the human condition, and certainly of no exalted moral or spiritual status above the mother in labour. Yet their job is to enable new life to come forth; if they are successful, then the baby will be the centre of attention in the room, and they will have been the enabler that supported the baby’s arrival, safe and sound. Yet this new life is not something that the midwife has been solely responsible for, and they have not borne the 9-month burden of growing it and preparing it for entry into the world; this burden has been the mother’s, hopefully supported by her community.

Perhaps this midwifery metaphor of human ministry is too self-effacing; indeed, many priests may spend a lot of their lives ‘fronting’ things, be they PCC meetings or the village flower fête. Yet the sense that priests bind together and enable the gather body of Christ to release and fulfil its collective calling is an important one; the Ordination service says that priests are to “discern and foster the gifts of all God’s people” - although perhaps it would be more freeing if priests were to enable God’s people to discern and foster their own gifts. Hopefully this will lead to Church being what Bishop Frensdorff calls “a ministering community rather than a community gathered around a minister” (Quoted in Reimagining Ministry p. 7). The priest is successful when the community is not all about them, and is not restricted to solely their ideas and energies.

However, there are some aspects that do not seem to be naturally encompassed by the midwifery metaphor. Some are ecclesiological: priests are to defend the tradition and doctrine of the Church of England (“Will you faithfully minister the doctrine and sacraments of Christ as the Church of England has received them…?”, from Questions at the Ordination Service); to only use authorised forms of worship (“I will use only the forms of service which are authorised or allowed by Canon”, Oaths taken at Ordination and at Licensing Services in the Church of England); to respect and uphold the spiritual hierarchy of Bishops, Priests and Deacons (“I will pay true and canonical obedience to the Lord Bishop of NN and his successors, in all things lawful and honest; so help me God”, Oaths taken at Ordination and at Licensing Services in the Church). Other aspects are directly to do with a priest’s engagement with the world: they are to resist evil; support the weak; defend the poor; intercede for all in need.

Maybe in these aspects, priests are called to be exemplars of the conduct which they are also helping the combined Body discern its own calling to; but as we have commented above, priests are of course fallible, and any expectation for them to themselves be exemplars of behaviour carries risk that they will attempt to replace Christ as the “pioneer and perfecter of our faith”.

Further, if priests are called to be exemplars of human conduct, there is a further risk (so often seen in practice!) that they will end up running everything in the parish. As Interviewee C said, the risk of busybodiness and messiah complex is ever-present in the church. Lewis-Anthony critiques Pritchard’s influential book, The Life and Work of a Priest, as being a breathless exhortation to over-work; he tells the anecdote of a colleague who re-titles it The Life and Nervous Breakdown of a Priest. But then Lewis-Anthony himself recommends “Getting Things Done (GTD)”, a methodology from the world of business, which aims to maximise individual human throughput, and which has had a great deal of uptake by senior executives in worldwide businesses. It was surprising to hear from Interviewee B, that for them, learning the juggling of multiple ongoing tasks was more important for their ministry than learning academic theology. Interviewees A, B, C and E all agreed that they feel guilty when they don’t have a lot of tasks to be doing, and that managing such guilt is a key battle of the priestly life.

This risk of the church using priests as human executives, with terms and behaviours borrowed from the secular world of work, has had a great deal of commentary, and many suggested antidotes. Steven Croft comments (in Ministry in Three Dimensions) that in the New Testament, priests were never referred to using the term archon, the normal term for a political leader. He prefers revisiting the traditional categories of bishop, priest and deacon, and seeing in every human minister a combination of diakonoi (work of service and visiting), presbuteroi (word and sacrament) and episkopoi (having oversight and decision-making), especially remembering that for much of the New Testament, an episkopos was someone with oversight over a single church, not a whole diocese. Justin Lewis-Anthony prefers to use the terms Witness, Watchman and Weaver to describe the priest’s role over a church; respectively, bearing public witness to the Christ faith through participation in Christ’s resurrection; acting as a watchman in being a “discerner and interpreter of culture” and how the church should confront or uphold it; and as someone who weaves together their community, knowing that intentional community does not happen by accident. (See If you see George Herbert on the Road chapters 7 to 9.. These headings are themselves based on a talk by Rowan Williams, “The Christian Priest Today”, at http://aoc2013.brix.fatbeehive.com/articles.php/2097/the-christian-priest-today-lecture-on-the-occasion-of-the-150th-anniversary-of-ripon-college-cuddesd, which is itself based on Michael Ramsey’s book of the same name.)

What do we learn from all this? It seems that, firstly, there is a broadly shared understanding of the minister-as-priest as someone who enables the church-as-priest, who is in Ramsey’s words

“one of the means of grace whereby God enables the Church to be the Church” (The Christian Priest Today. I am strongly reminded of Stanley Hauerwas' own dictum, that Christians exist not to make the world more just, but 'to make the world the world'. In his view, existence makes no sense without Christians to explain and interpret it as the loving creative act of a redemptive God - see his Hannah's Child).

Such enabling can be seen as reflection, or offering, and is well captured by Interviewee B’s midwifery metaphor. Yet there is a tension here, as the Ordinal also contains various other exhortations to be an exemplar, that might cause priests to find themselves in a leadership role akin to politics or secular business, which the New Testament tries studiously to avoid. The antidote to this is further reflection on the emerging models of ministry in the New Testament. Such reflection also needs to engage with the current Diocesan strategy, which stipulates that, with the changes recommended in Reimagining Ministry,

Each viable congregation and its associated building will have a designated ‘Focal Minister’ and an appropriate structure for oversight that is equivalent to (if not actually) a PCC or DCC with local lay leadership.

In many areas, there will not be a one-to-one relationship between ‘focal ministers’ and churches. Any idea that the priest runs and owns everything that happens, needs to be disposed of, in order for the body of Christ to be fully empowered to be all that it can be.

Presumably there will be legal reforms needed too; Interviewee B mentioned a colleague of theirs who is responsible for 8 parishes including 5 open churchyards, and is clearly cracking under the pressure. Such administrative overhead must surely interfere with the priest’s energy to enable the priesthood of all believers, to be the priesthood of all believers.

The good news, however, is that if we do manage to navigate the needed cultural change, we will find a model of minister-as-priest in churches which frees the Body of Christ to find and follow its calling; which acts against stress and burnout of full-time stipendiary clergy; which is in harmony with the emerging model of church in the New Testament; and which is fit for our current context in terms of finances and stipendiary numbers. If we do this, there is hope that the Church will, better than before, truly reflect the love of God to humanity, and offer humanity back up to God in praise.

The next blog in the series will explore my own personal reflections on what the Church of England priesthood means to me.