Video for July 4th, 2024
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video.
2024 is a significant year for me in many ways. My middle son got married here at the Cathedral on June 15th. This weekend just gone is the 30th anniversary of my own ordination to the diaconate and on St. Matthias day, May 14th was the tenth anniversary of my ordination as a Bishop. It’s a joy every year to ordain another group of people embarking on that ministerial journey. This year we ordained five deacons and another five were ordained priest. It was a wonderful occasion with great crowds of people attending to pray and wish our candidates well.
We have to be careful doing this lest the focus on their act of commitment and celebration of the call of God is confused with the establishment of an unhealthy hierarchy. In our culture you cannot separate leadership from authority and importance. If you are a leader, you are by definition more important than those who aren’t. But the foundational ordination to the diaconate reverses this. When someone becomes a priest or a Bishop they don’t stop being a deacon. All orders of ministry are designed to model something and call out those gifts from others. A deacon is called to remind the whole people of God about the priority of service. As the scriptures say, “the son of man did not come to be served, but to serve.” Jesus modelled this by the revolting task of washing his disciple’s feet, something only a slave could be compelled to do. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians reminds us that the primary task of ministry is not to do everything ourselves but to encourage the whole people of God to own their responsibilities as baptised Christians to live for Christ and make him known to others. They do that is a particular way, as the following quote from the Methodist church makes clear.
“We are ordaining you to something smaller and less spectacular: to read and interpret those sacred stories of our community, so that they speak a word to people today; to remember and practice those rituals and rites of meaning that in their poetry address human beings at the level where change operates; to foster in community through word and sacrament that encounter with truth which will set men and women free to minister as the body of Christ.”
What this quote sums up so brilliantly is the role of Christian leadership in helping people own their faith and the responsibilities that flow from it for themselves. Directive leadership, standing on status, may achieve a grudging compliance, but it can never truly get the ownership that leads to a movement that changes the world. Paul in his letter to the Philippians, Chapter 2: 13, recognised a similar work of the Holy Spirit. “For it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfil his good purpose.” If the work of the Holy Spirit isn’t coercive or manipulative, those in Christian ministry should be the same. To be servant is not to collude with destructive patterns of behaviour. We serve by challenging these for a person’s good, motivated by the love that wants to see the best called out of them. Similarly, servant ministry is not to be a doormat. Sometimes it needs to challenge existing power structures within churches for the good of the whole and the liberation of God’s people.
Not all are called to ordained ministry. Whilst that role is vital to the health of the Church, it doesn’t make us more important than those – which is most Christians in fact, who exercise their call primarily in home, school, community and workplace. Ordained ministry exists to facilitate that effective ministry by everyone else. As the liturgy at the licencing of a new priest reminds us, Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up”. My prayer for all those I ordained last weekend and those they serve would be that God would equip all of us to enter that calling together. I pray that our newly elected leaders might enter their roles in the same spirit.
+Richard