My wife, Marti, got ordained yesterday by the church she is a member of, Arlington Presbyterian Church. I am not super familiar with the order of the Presbyterian Church since I grew up in the United Methodist Church. Yet, while I was a United Methodist all of my life until about ten years ago I realize I was never super familiar with the order of the UMC either! But Marti loves her church and serves her church well, using her gifts to edify and lift up the Body of Christ and all within the parish of Arlington. If anyone should be ordained by their local body of fellow worshippers, then it definitely should be Marti.
I have long struggled with what ordination means and how it is used in most mainline churches. When I first began in full-time vocational ministry as a Youth Pastor at a United Methodist Church in a small town in West Texas I knew I was called by God to ministry and I was called by God to serve the people in that church. People in my church recognized I had a call on my life and so, they and my pastor encouraged me to pursue ordination in the United Methodist Church. From the moment I began the process it felt…well…off.
The truth is I didn’t get very far down the road. I went to a few interviews, filled out a little bit of paperwork and was assigned a mentor. He talked me through the process at that time and what it would entail. I was not deeply excited about the process and then, he told me about how it culminated. In the end, I would take an oath to follow the Bishop’s leadership, agreeing to go wherever the Bishop decided I should go. I remember being stunned when he told me that. That was the dealbreaker for me. The truth is that I did not trust any Bishop to decide for me where I should go and what I should do. I had never met the Bishop and I also knew a little about the politics that surrounded all of the movements of pastors inside the UMC and none of this inspired me at all. The more I learned about the ordination process the less and less appealing it became. I soon dropped out altogether.
I did wrestle with whether my complete lack of interest in institutional ordination and if that somehow diminished my calling. So many people I knew and respected were being ordained and I remained – at least at that time – affiliated with the United Methodist Church so, I wondered, what is wrong with me?
And I want to be sure and not diminish the choice some people make to be ordained in institutional denominations. However, when I read Scripture it felt like ordination was something that rose up from local communities rather than something that came down from powerful positions located in large institutions. Being ordained has always seemed to me to originate from a recognition among those who know the ordinand; those most familiar with the person. They acknowledge the gifts for leadership because they have witnessed those gifts in real life and in real contexts. The body with whom the person worships and lives life testifies to the presence of God’s call on the person’s life and they both see the need for the person to be set apart for service to people and to God.
From my experiences in a mainline denomination for 25 years, institutional ordination somehow became a formal process of detachment from the Body and, all too often, a self-righteous perch from which to speak down to the rest of the church – the laity. This is wrong and has zero foundation in Scripture. One main reason why this happened is that ordination became a lifetime status rather than a role that is driven by context and specific call. And that lifetime status comes with some pretty attractive features: full healthcare, pension, and an income that continually increases regardless of whether you are effective or not. It reflects capitalism more than the Kingdom.
Again, I am not trying to diminish individuals who are called to serve as ordained pastors in mainline denominations. I know a lot of people in those positions and many, if not most, are faithful leaders who sincerely love God and people. But I do want to point out that ordination was not originally a career. It was the recognition of a local body of believers who witnessed God’s call on someone’s life to love and serve God and love and serve people in a position of leadership within that individual local body. And I feel strongly that one step towards greater relevance and effectiveness within our mainline denominations will happen when ordination systems are decentered from detached bodies of governance and are returned to local bodies of believers.
More than anything today, I join the good people of Arlington Presbyterian Church in recognizing the amazing gifts for leadership in my wife, Marti.
