June 2004
Page 1 - The Myth of the Lay Person - Contending for the Liberation of the Church By Paul Anderson and Graeme Sellers
Page 2 - The Awards Banquet - Toward a Theology of Rewards By Paul Anderson
The Myth of the Lay Person - Contending for the Liberation of the Church
By Paul Anderson and Graeme SellersFrom the earliest days of their training Lutheran pastors are well-rehearsed in this definition of the church: "The church is where the Word of God is preached and the sacraments rightly administered." Upon closer examination, however, there are some serious deficiencies in this definition.
This definition falters most profoundly as it highlights the role of pastoral professionals to the exclusion of the so-called laity. The artificial distinction between clergy and laity is one of the greatest heresies of our day. It is a false divide most vigorously defended by those who have a stake in preserving the present ecclesiastical power structure, a structure which reserves for seminary-trained experts the right to do the "higher" ministry of preaching, baptizing, marrying, burying, and celebrating the Lord's Supper.
But Scripture, especially its account of the Church's infancy, exposes the fallacy of such thinking. Pentecost-the birth moment of the Church-was a lay movement and a triumph of the purposes of God to advance His kingdom through ordinary, unschooled people. When Peter and John were dragged before the Jewish high council for preaching the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, their lack of formal training was a source of astonishment for Israel's religious leaders. "The members of the council were amazed when they saw the boldness of Peter and John," Acts 4:13 reports, "for they could see that they were ordinary men who had no special training. They also recognized them as men who had been with Jesus." Intimate friendship with Jesus, not a degree from the local yeshiva, was the basis for participation in kingdom ministry as the Church was being born. Unordained men and women turned the world upside down and electrified it with the revelation of God's heart for humankind.
Two thousand years later, it would appear that we have "advanced" the Church right out of the ways of God.Our Baffling Theological Madness
In today's clergy-dominated church, we have trouble trusting lay people. They may fly 747's, or oversee multinational corporations, or teach in the classroom, but often we are reluctant to release them into meaningful roles in the church. For all our talk about the priesthood of all believers, we perpetuate the regime of the priesthood of the priests. In this regard the Reformation is incomplete. It will remain unfulfilled until we deliver it from the misguided belief that only religious professionals belong to the priestly caste. If we are to live into the promise of the Reformation, then followers of Jesus must be liberated from an institutionalized church that is reluctant to trust people without seminary training.The faulty definition of the church we've inherited-the church is where the Word of God is preached and the sacraments rightly administered-holds us hostage to an ideology and practice that limits kingdom possibilities. This definition is restrictive and presumptive-restrictive because it cordons off the boundaries of authentic priestly ministry and presumptive because it presumes that "we" (seminary-trained experts) know better than "they" (rank and file followers of Jesus) do.
Should this not strike us as a form of theological madness? If we haven't lost our minds, at the very least we appear to have lost our Bibles. The exclusivity of this understanding of ministry fails to find expression in Scripture or in the experience of the young church. We grandly caution against an "improper administration of the sacrament" as though we have fully apprehended the mystery of sacramental ministry and are the only ones who can be trusted with it. We fear authorizing non-professionals to do sacramental ministry because they might make mistakes, and we cannot allow the honor of God to be compromised. Do we seriously imagine that we must defend God's honor, or that His honor is so frail that the least flub in the flesh will mortally wound it? History's witness is that God is quite able to defend His honor without our aid and that, as a general rule, our attempts to assist in His defense end unhappily.
Our exclusive understanding of ministry would be baffling to the New Testament writers. Paul left behind unordained elders to oversee local churches he had just established. But according to the constitutional requirements of many churches today-and this includes most Lutheran congregations-Paul's elders would not be qualified to serve at the Lord's Table. Not only would we insist that they jump through our institutional and educational hoops, we'd also demand they undergo a battery of personality tests by a licensed therapist to ensure their emotional stability according to the latest clinical standards. Far-fetched? Then consider just one recent example.
A revered pastor in the Lutheran renewal movement recently accepted a staff position at a prominent ELCA church. He has more than thirty years of experience as a pastor, including a number of years within the ELCA before transferring his credentials to another Lutheran organization. But when he met with his local bishop, the bishop was surprised and upset that this pastor had performed word and sacrament ministry at his new church without being a rostered ELCA clergyman. Operating within a fixed institutional paradigm, the bishop was unable to see past humanly concocted rules for ministry. The call of God on this pastor's life, the many years of experience doing authorized sacramental ministry, the reservoir of integrity and respect that he had built up over his time in ministry-ultimately, none of these really mattered. What mattered were the rules, the regulations. The result? In order to be re-rostered with the ELCA-and therefore authorized to perform sacramental ministry-this pastor would have to pass muster with a candidacy committee, submit a sermon in writing, and see a psychiatrist who would administer the MMPI and Myers-Briggs personality inventories.If receiving sanction to perform ministry is this serpentine for an ordained, seminary-trained pastor, then what chance does a person without specialized training have in today's church? Almost none. This begs the question: Where did we get the idea that baptizing or presiding at communion is solely the province of the ordained? Who says a father or mother can't baptize their child at a public ceremony? Why can't members of a home group who have been experiencing the healing power of the Holy Spirit for six months celebrate communion together without a pastor present? The answer is clear: the rules, the regulations, and a definition of the church that insists on reserving sacramental ministry for an elite class of spiritual shepherds simply will not allow it.
Look, Honey, I Shrunk the Church!
This definition not only restrains those who are followers of Jesus, it miniaturizes the church into a one-hour Sunday morning activity. While it's true that the Word can be preached and that baptism and the Lord's Supper can be celebrated on any day of the week, our culture typically sets its watch for these activities to occur on Sunday morning. Predictably, we tend to focus on Sunday disproportionately, giving it far more attention than the kingdom-things we engage in Monday through Saturday. The numbers alone should tell us we're off track: this single hour on Sunday morning is only 60 minutes out of 10,080 weekly minutes, yet we feature it to the neglect of the 167 other hours we spend elsewhere. The upshot is this: elevating the clergy and their Sunday morning role as dispensers of grace minimizes those who are not ordained and suggests that there is really only one hour of the week where meaningful ministry takes place.A top-down definition of the church overestimates the role of clergy and underestimates the role of the unordained; it flatters the pastors and demeans the people. Inevitably it hamstrings the cause of Christ and the expansion of the kingdom by excluding the majority of those who belong to Jesus from key ministry experiences. As a result, we are encouraging those who need it least and discouraging those who need encouragement the most. Clergy do not need more encouragement to minister, but rather to stop dominating the ministry and start releasing others into their kingdom destiny as ministers of God's grace and mercy to a hurting world. Those who are not religious professionals do not need to be held back, tamped down, and reined in; they need permission and championing to courageously step forward into their appointed place with God without worrying that they are inferior because they have not graduated from seminary or been stamped with an institutional seal of approval.
The stewarding of the sacraments is not the core-identity of most pastors today. In any given week the amount of time clergy spend performing technically sacramental acts is relatively minor. And Paul's counsel to the Corinthians would seem to suggest that his focus on discipling people to become more and more like Jesus Christ held far greater importance for him than sacramental duties (1 Corinthians 1:17): "For Christ didn't send me to baptize, but to preach the Good News…" Those pastors who see their calling as essentially sacramental in nature tend to have a lopsided view of ministry and are the least likely to release people into significant kingdom ministry. But the Bible's description of a pastor's role is quite different. Not only are pastors to preach the Word in season and out of season and devote themselves to prayer, but they are also responsible "to equip God's people to do His work and build up the church, the body of Christ, until we come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God's Son that we will be mature and full grown in the Lord, measuring up to the full stature of Christ" (Ephesians 4:12-13, NLT). According to Scripture, equipping is a chief role of pastors, and the enduring quality of their work will be measured in part by their faithfulness in raising up and releasing followers of Jesus into ministry.
Who's Zooming Who?
If pastors are hesitant to release the followers of Jesus into unrestricted, full Good News ministry, it may be because institutional paperwork has become the enemy of powerful kingdom work. Even the language of the institutional church is imposing: pastors "preside" at communion and they "officiate" at baptisms. Make no mistake; these are power words, conveying the concept that certain priestly duties are exclusively for the spiritually elite and specially ordained. Outsiders need not apply. But whom are we kidding here? Or, as Aretha Franklin asked in her pop hit, "Who's zooming who?" There's no language in the New Testament mirroring the pretentious self-importance of pastors "presiding" and "officiating." The New Testament speaks the language of serving, sacrificing, and decreasing so that others might increase.
Rather than watch-dogging the sacraments against potential intruders, pastors should be encouraged to assist in ceremonies in which a father baptizes his child or a friend baptizes someone she prayed with to receive Christ. Pastors should be delighted to serve as part of a team during a communion service in which the words of institution are spoken by a respected follower of Jesus. To do so is to give value to the priestly roles of all of God's children and accords beautifully with Peter's description of Jesus' followers as "a kingdom of priests, God's holy nation, his very own possession" (I Peter 2:9a). This means that at the very minimum our inherited definition of the church needs to be tweaked to say "…where the Word of God is taught, received, and applied, and where the sacraments are shared for strength and for the building up of the body of Christ."Or consider this definition, offered by Ted Haggard, pastor of a healthy church in Colorado Springs. "The church is a dynamic, empowering, life-giving set of relationships." While this is not an exhaustive definition, it includes some aspects missing in the Lutheran definition.
Importantly, this definition breaks free from the false division between laity and clergy. There are things that distinguish each of these groups, of course. But the distinction is not that the pastors do the ministry while the people receive the ministry. Paul makes it clear in his letter to the Ephesian church that ministry is the calling of each person who belongs to Jesus and that the pastor's main job is to train and equip people to do it effectively.
Haggard's definition also rightly calls attention to the crucial ingredient of relationships. When Paul discusses the church, his language is almost always relationship-based: the relationship between different members of the body, the interdependence of the body's many parts, the gifting of each one in the body, the need to honor and respect one another for the body to function properly.
An understanding of the church as a dynamic, empowering, life-giving set of relationships levels out the playing field, inviting both the professional and non-professional church member into significance. Perhaps most importantly, it understands the church from the perspective of who we are rather than what we do. The church is not a series of sacramental ministries performed with priestly precision, which effectively make it pleasing to God. It is people in relationship with each other and with God, who is pleased not because of all the technical religious skills we've acquired, but because of the life of His own Son which abounds in us.What's at Stake
What is at stake? Not just the tweaking of a definition but the liberating of the church. We desperately need to dispel the myth of the lay person and break down the dividing wall between pastors and those whom they shepherd. The sleeping giant-the rank and file followers of Jesus-needs to be awakened, trained, and released for service. Pastors must embrace their primary responsibility as releasing people to do the ministry of the kingdom. This focus will necessitate proper training and Spirit-saturated empowering and careful attention to character, of course, but it must be done. There is nothing optional about this calling if we are to fulfill the destiny God has placed upon us, His church.The mainstream Lutheran Church, along with many other denominations, is on a self-delusional head trip. It has reserved the important stuff for those who have gone to seminary. It has restricted the "highest" expressions of ministry for those who bear the imprimatur of the institution. Little wonder, then, that in congregations all across the globe, people look at their pastors and say, "They've got the training. Let them do the ministry." Far better, far healthier, and far more biblical to hear them say, "Equip me, pastor. I want to do what God designed me to do."
Why do non-ordained people frequently doubt their own calling and effectiveness? Why do they typically defer ministry to the experts? Why do they often feel unqualified, dumb, and fearful of failure? Perhaps it's because they've been saddled with a definition of the church that denies them significance and equal footing with those specially trained for pastoral ministry. Perhaps it's because they are waiting for an understanding of the church that highlights the value and purpose of all the people of God, and not just the ordained. Although seeing the church as a dynamic, empowering, life-giving set of relationships is an incomplete description-it doesn't include some important aspects, like teaching the Word of God-it does give proper focus to the communion of the saints, not just the communion of the priests.
Ultimately, what's at stake is the destiny of Jesus' followers and the winning of a world lost in darkness. It is the people of God, not just the pastors of God, who have been called out of darkness into His wonderful light so that they can show others the goodness of God. The stranglehold of exclusivity and division must be broken, and the breaking starts first with those who have been called to shepherd God's flock. When healthy pastors rise up-men and women more interested in empowering people than in demonstrating and protecting their own power-then God's people will be encouraged to follow the dreams God has placed in their hearts and to step confidently into their kingdom future with the One whose promise over their lives is Yes! and Amen! in Christ Jesus.Paul Anderson, Director of Lutheran Renewal, may be reached at: panderon@aol.com. Graeme Sellers is senior pastor of Nativity Lutheran Church in Gilbert, AZ (www.nativityaz.org). He is also on the Leadership Team of the ARC. You may contact him at: gvsellers@nativitygilbert.org.
