The ministers of the Church are lay persons, bishops, priests, and deacons.
We were sitting in a meeting room some time ago, when I asked the question of our teenage confirmation candidates and heard that response. I still remember it, not because the teenagers had come up with some radical answer - after all, it came directly from page 855 our Book of Common Prayer, in the section of the Catechism about “The Ministry” - but because when I was a teenager, I would have answered differently. When I was growing up, the minister was the man up the front who talked and prayed and read from scripture. The Catechism in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer didn’t mention ministry or ministers at all, and I suspect its writers would have been someone confused by our inclusion of lay persons as ministers of the Church.
Things have changed. The Church used to be a place with clearly defined roles: the clergy did “ministry”, and lay people did what the priest couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do. Men (and the clergy were men) typically didn’t arrange flowers, and that task fell to the women, along with cleaning and caring for the silver and vestments. In the mid twentieth century, bulletins became popular, and if the priest wasn’t particularly adept with the typewriter, his wife or one of the ladies of the parish might help out. Visiting was officially done by the priest, although an often almost invisible network of parishioners carried information and provided practical help to those in need. Lay people dealt with practicalities like maintenance and finance. And the priest preached sermons and celebrated sacraments and was the religious expert.
Then along came the new prayer book, and suddenly we were all ministers, charged with representing Christ and his Church, and, among other things, with taking our places in the life, worship, and governance of the Church. We became partners, working alongside one another, in the work of God.
And the boundaries blurred. Lay people started leading bible studies, and visiting people who were sick, bringing them communion, and even preaching. Clergy started talking about theories of leadership and financial stewardship. The lines between the spiritual and the temporal - and who was responsible for which - blurred. We began to pay greater attention to the gifts people had been given by God, and less to the traditional roles and expectations.
Of course, what was happening was in fact not new at all. It was simply a reshaping of our corporate life to better reflect the call of the New Testament, where it’s made clear that God gives gifts to every Christian for the good of the church. So we read in Ephesians 4:, “But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift...The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.” The lists of gifts are expanded elsewhere, to include administration, and healing, and interpreting, and generosity, and encouragement. There are no clear lines between clergy and laity; all of us are given gifts; all of us are called to use them.
And who does what is not so much a matter of tradition and role, but of giftedness and willingness. Of course, there are certain things - absolution, blessing, consecration - that are reserved for the ordained, and in our tradition, they are responsible for overseeing the ministry of the church as a whole. But most of who does what is up for grabs. It just might be that a child has a gift for reading, or a man for flower arranging, or a priest for singing, or a woman for preaching. And so they are trained and commissioned and set free to do the work that God has called them to. Not because the priest can’t or won’t, but because the gifts of God are spilling out everywhere, activated by the Spirit, and we’d be foolish to ignore them!
Who are the ministers of the church?
WE ARE!
