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PART 1

The Root of Priestly Life

1

Being Called

Go at the call of God,

the call to follow on,

to leave security behind

and go where Christ has gone.

Go in the name of God,

the name of Christ you bear;

take up the cross, its victim’s love

with all the world to share.

Go in the love of God,

explore its depth and height.

Held fast by love that cares, that heals,

in love walk in the light.

Go in the strength of God,

in weakness prove God true.

The strength that dares to love and serve

God will pour out in you.

Go with the saints of God,

our common life upbuild,

that daily as we walk God’s way

we may with love be filled.

O God, to you we come,

your love alone to know,

your name to own, your strength to prove,

and at your call to go.1

Setting the scene

‘There is no one way of being a priest’.2 These words of Rowan Williams are true. People are very different. Parishes and other contexts for ministry are very different. Types of ministries are very different. That is why this book is not primarily about ministry. We are not trying to say to different people in different contexts exercising different types of ministry how they should minister. The matrix of possibilities for ministry is endless. They depend on who you are (e.g. an extrovert or an introvert), where you are (e.g. an urban or a rural environment, a parish or workplace context) and what other responsibilities you have in life (e.g. a marriage, children, other employment). The permutations are affected by any number of psychological, social, economic, theological and cultural factors that renders futile any attempt to offer a blueprint for ministry regardless of the particularities of personality, place and position.

Nevertheless, as we have both sought to live out the ordained life and as we have prepared men and women for stipendiary and self-supporting ordained ministry in a range of different contexts, and as we have looked back over some of the ‘pastoral classics’ written over the centuries – some of them at times of massive cultural shifts comparable with our own day – we have become convinced that that there are certain conditions, characteristics and consequences of an ordained life that stand in common across the centuries, cultures and contexts.

We have chosen to use an organic model to express these. We have thought in terms of a tree with its roots, shape and fruit. There are certain conditions that determine the identity of the priest, roots that go deep into the Church’s life in God. There are characteristics that define the life of the priest, features that give it a recognizable shape. When the conditions are right and the characteristics in place, there will be some consequences, some outcomes of grace to the ministry of the priest, just as when all is well with the roots and shape of a tree, good fruit is produced for the good of all. The shape and fruit of the ordained life are the subject of later chapters. We begin now with the roots. It is an exploration that requires us to dig deeply into some historical and theological ground.

Vocational identity

A lot of theological blood has been spilt over whether ordination is about what we do, a set of functions that activate our ordination, or about who we are, a way of being in the life of the Church that is indelibly marked upon us at ordination. More technically, is ordination functional or ontological? In John’s Gospel Jesus cuts through these sorts of unnecessary distinctions with the help of his own organic analogy of the vine. He tells his disciples that they are his friends, friends who love each other. They are like the branches of a vine. They are connected to Christ as the vine and to each other as fellow branches. They have been chosen to be with Christ. Christian identity is fundamentally relational. It is a called identity, a vocational identity. This calling into Christ precedes what we do for Christ and even how we live for Christ, though at the same time it predetermines our doing and being as Christians.

Our calling into Christ is simultaneously a calling into Christ’s messianic ministry, his service. Yet Jesus says that we are not slaves who are told what they have to do and who know that their obedience is required by their position in life. We are his friends, people who have been called to be with Christ and who, being with Christ, learn to love as he loves and to do as he does. Function is a modern mechanical concept, concerned with productivity. Ontology is a Greek philosophical concept, concerned with questions of being or existence. Both may betray a predilection for power – power that comes from effective control over sources and systems, or power that comes from a permanent, guaranteed existence in the scheme of things. But the only power that Jesus offers his disciples is the power of love. It is a love that we receive through being embedded into Christ and it is a love that we embody in the life of the Christian community. This dynamic, energetic, relational vitality is the sap of Christian life that propels us into Christian ministry as we live from the life of Christ into which we have been called. All that we are in Christ and all that we do for Christ arise from a vocation, a calling into a certain sort of relation to him – a relationship of extraordinary grace.

All this applies to our baptismal identity in Christ as we share in his life and then begin to walk in his way. It also applies to the particular identity of the ordained in a particular way. Christ has called us to play our part in the life of the vine. We must now consider what that part is.

The priestly people of God

The first letter of Peter is a good guide for anyone wanting to consider the place of the ordained in the life of the people of God. The letter takes for granted the ministry of presbyters (presbuteroi in Greek, often translated as ‘elders’ in English versions of the Bible), but makes some of the strongest statements about the priestly identity of the whole people of God to be found in the New Testament.

Come to [Christ], a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ . . . you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light. (1 Peter 2:4–5, 9)

We will come on to the ministry of those called to presbyteral ministry in the life of the Church in the next section of this chapter, but it is worth noting at this stage that the definition of the people of God as a priestly community, within which certain members of that community are called to exercise different ministries, is not a New Testament invention. Indeed, 1 Peter is quoting a pastiche of Old Testament references which celebrate the privilege of the covenant people to minister before Yahweh, the God of Israel, and to proclaim his works to the nations. God’s people have always been a ‘royal priesthood’ (Exodus 19:6) with certain people called from within the community to shape and to form its life so that it may witness to the world. Yet the priestly ministry of Christ adds a new dimension to the identity and activity of God’s people in the new covenant. 1 Peter’s architectural analogy of the building uses a similar structure to John’s organic image of the vine. We are keyed into Christ and our lives and service operate from Christ’s life and service. We are embedded into Christ and so we embody the characteristics of Christ.

Christ’s life is lived before God and before the whole created order. Christ is the Son whose joy is to adore the Father. The tender scene of the boy Jesus absorbed in the life of the temple, saying to his parents ‘Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house’ (Luke 2:49) is a window into the eternal intimacy of God’s Trinitarian life in which the Son, moved by the Spirit, serves the Father with irrepressible devotion. Christ is the eternal priest who lives with another for the praise of another.

Christ is also the mediator between God and the world. All things were made through him. He is God’s communication with the world and the world’s communication with God. He dwelt in the world, sharing our life (Hebrews 2:17), attracting people by his holiness, astounding them by his teaching and healing, amazing people with his humility, apprehending them even in his death and then astonishing people with his risen life. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, this was ‘a man for others’ – a human being who lived and died for the justification, reconciliation and sanctification of others. Christ is the eternal priest who lives with others for the blessing of others.

Dallas Willard is fond of saying that following Christ means doing the things that Jesus did and teaching the things that Jesus taught in the manner that Jesus did and said them.3 It is a good summary of the calling of the Church. We are not just to announce the good news of God’s coming rule and reign, we are to demonstrate the presence of God’s kingdom breaking into our world and we are to do both in such a way as to express and embody the priestly mind and method of Christ. Robert Moberly, in his seminal study of Ministerial Priesthood, described the Christlike orientation of the Church as an ‘intense “for-other-ness”’. It is manifested both in the Church’s self- giving to God and in its self-giving to the world.

The Church is priestly because from her proceeds the aroma of perpetual offering towards God. The Church is priestly because her arms are spread out perpetually to succour and intercede for those who need the sacrifice of love . . . Then the Church is God’s priest in the world and for the world, alike as presenting to God on the world’s behalf that homage which the world has not learned to present for itself, and a spending and suffering for God in service to the world.4

Moberly goes on to explain that this ‘for-other-ness’ is not merely a strategy for coping with humanity’s present problems and limitations. It is not a case of some being in need and some trying to meet that need. This way of living is actually the fulfilment of God’s design for humanity. It is, in the language of David Ford, a life lived facing God and others.5 Made in the image of God, we are created as relational beings whose full human identity can be only realized through open and respectful relationships with others. This with-other-ness and for-other-ness is the sort of life that Jesus lived – a life lived before the face of God and before the face of others, open to all the possibilities of genuine encounter that come when we allow ourselves to look into the eyes and to be seen by the eyes of another.

Being with others so that we may be for others involves more than giving ourselves to others. It also requires us to receive from others. Jesus’ devotion to God is not only the expression in the conditions of human life of the Son’s eternal glorification of the Father, it is also the mirror of the Father’s glorification of the Son and of the Son’s reception of all that the Father gives. Even Jesus’ ministry was not one-way traffic. His creation of a ‘community of the face’6 speaks of Jesus’ natural enjoyment of others. The affection of the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet with her oil and tears and then wiped them with her hair is received by Jesus. Jesus’ words from the cross to the penitent thief, ‘Today you will be with me in paradise’, are the poignant words of a person anticipating the future in the permanent company of others.

This sort of life – a life that loves the other – is the sort of priestly life lived with the other for the other that the Church is called to live. We can only live this life in the power of the Spirit who enthuses us with the love of Christ and forms within us the other-orientated life of Christ, the truly ecstatic life, the life that finds its joy in the other. In this way we participate in the priesthood of Christ. As we see in 1 Peter, when we ‘offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God’ we are exercising our priesthood through Christ and when we ‘proclaim the mighty acts of God’, Christ is exercising his priesthood through us. It is not that Christ has done his work which somehow qualifies us to do our work. It is rather that Christ’s perfect priestly sacrifice for sin has allowed us to enter into the holy place of his presence before the Father so that we may participate in his priestly prayer for and proclamation to the world. There is only one Christian priesthood, and that is the priesthood of Christ, the priest into whose ministry we are gathered through baptism and by faith, and in whose life human identity is perfected.

The presbyter among the priestly people of God

The insistence of 1 Peter on the priestly character and ministry of God’s people is well stated in the Porvoo Agreement between the Church of England and the Nordic Churches.

All the baptised . . . are called to offer their being as ‘a living sacrifice’ and to intercede for the Church and the salvation of the world. This is the corporate priesthood of the whole people of God and the calling to ministry and service.7

However, as we said earlier, 1 Peter maintains, in a very natural, matter-of-fact sort of way – showing there was nothing contentious in what he was saying – a dual reference to both the priestly character of the people of God and the particular ministry of those appointed presbyters in the early Christian communities.

I exhort the elders (presbuteroi) among you to tend the flock that is in your charge (kleros), exercising the oversight (episcope¯), not under compulsion but willingly, as God would have you do it. (1 Peter 5:1–2)

Other New Testament documents, especially the book of Acts, indicate that the appointment of elders was part of the missionary strategy of the early Church. After churches had been planted in different areas presbyters were appointed to tend and nurture their new life. This certainly seems to be the pattern in the new churches of the Iconium region in what is now southern Turkey established during Paul’s first missionary journey (Acts 14:21–23) and in Crete later in Paul’s ministry (Titus 1:5). Elsewhere we are told that there were presbyters in Ephesus in western Turkey (Acts 20) and, according to 1 Peter, in a large number of other churches in western Turkey and in the north of the country as well (1 Peter 1:1). Clearly the Church in Rome, from where 1 Peter was written, also had its presbyters. We can see from the more established church life towards the end of the first century reflected in the letters of Timothy and James that presbyters played a prominent part in church life (1 Timothy 4:14, 5:15; James 5:17) and it is very clear that in the earliest Christian community – the Jerusalem church – presbyters were very evident, particularly in the decision-making processes of the Church (Acts 15). Elders were a familiar part of synagogue life and it seems that their office was transferred in a natural sort of way to the new Christian communities.

All this amounts to very clear evidence for the existence of presbyters in the embryonic life of the Church. But what did they do? It is clear that they provided leadership within the churches and they probably did so in a collegial way because it is likely that each church had more than one presbyter. However, it is worth saying that the images and verbs used in the New Testament to describe the work of the presbyters are more subtle and nuanced than most of our contemporary talk of ‘church leaders’, and that most of the explicit references to ‘leaders’ occur in only one chapter of the book of Hebrews. Leadership was undoubtedly a key role of the elders in the early Christian communities but perhaps the example of the self-effacing leadership of Christ, the experience of the guidance of the Spirit and the dynamics of Christian existence in one mutually dependent body, made the churches careful about how they defined the form of leadership consistent with the new life of the gospel. It is a caution reflected in the ordination prayers of the Christian tradition.

For one of the best indications of the part played by presbyters in the life of the New Testament communities we need to turn to Paul’s farewell address to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20. Paul had spent about three years in Ephesus. He had used it as a base from which to reach much of western Turkey. His time there had been extraordinarily eventful. He had found Apollos there and other followers of Jesus whose understanding and experience of the faith was seriously limited. His ministry among them led to a Pentecost-type outpouring of the Spirit that was the beginning of the sort of ministry summarized in Dallas Willard’s catchphrase. Paul taught as Jesus taught about God’s kingdom to Jews and Gentiles and he did as Jesus did. People were healed and delivered, and the powerful exponents and authorities of Ephesian pagan and Jewish religion were challenged and undermined. As we shall see in a moment, Paul seems to have handled himself with great personal integrity, devotion to the work of God and deep love for the new community of Christ emerging around him.

In Acts 20 Paul is travelling near Ephesus. He sends word to the Ephesian elders that he would like to meet with them again, convinced that this will be his last time ever to see them. In a moving and emotional address in which Paul’s affection for them and for the whole Ephesian church is very clear, he implores them:

Keep watch over yourselves and over all the flock, of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers (episcopoi), to shepherd the Church of God that he obtained with the blood of his own Son. (Acts 20:28)

These are words that were to keep reappearing in the ordination prayers of the churches, so it is worth spending some time with them. The predominant image is pastoral – pastoral, that is, in the sense of the shepherding that was familiar to first-century people and which fills the biblical use of any pastoral metaphor: a demanding life dedicated more to developing health than maintaining comfort, more used to keeping them on the move than finding spuriously safe places to hide, committed to building up the life of the whole flock so that it is strong, energetic and generative, able to grow in quality and quantity. Paul would not have seen any opposition between the pastoral and the missionary. The Church of his day was missionary. The effectiveness of its mission required presbyters who could preserve its missionary character as a body in continual motion towards God’s purposes. Presbyteral ministry therefore clearly involved oversight. Paul even calls the presbyters ‘overseers’ – episcopoi in Greek, often translated as ‘bishops’. By the middle of the second century the ministry of the episcopoi became distinguished from the ministry of the presbuteroi but at this stage they appear to be two ways of describing the same ministry. In fact, for some time after the second century their ministries were closely identifiable and certainly much of the work of a bishop up to at least the fourth century was very similar to work of many parish priests today. Teaching was a key element in the presbyter-bishop’s oversight of the life of the people. With a ‘firm grasp of the word’ (Titus 1:9) they were to ‘labour in preaching and teaching’ (1 Timothy 5:17). They were to keep watch over, look after, oversee the life of Christ’s people, working with other ministries to ensure that the Church in that place is deeply rooted in the word and life of Christ, so that the body can ‘build itself up in love’ (Ephesians 4:16).

Paul knew from his own experience that ‘keeping watch’ involved protecting the people from danger, even the danger that might erupt from within (Acts 20:19–20) and supporting the weak, especially the poverty stricken (Acts 20:35). He commends the presbyters to follow his example. The ease with which Paul encourages them to look to his example signals another theme that consistently reoccurs not only through the biblical witness but also in the liturgies of the churches and other repositories of the Church’s wisdom about its ordained ministries. As well as his compassion for the weak and his commitment to the health of the Church, there are at least three other features of Paul’s style of ministry that deserve attention. The first is simply that his ministry was genuinely ministry or, in Greek diakonia, meaning service: ‘You yourselves know how I lived among you . . . serving the Lord with all humility’ (Acts 20:19). His ministry was rooted in an incarnational identification with the people and demonstrated itself through faithful evangelistic preaching and catechetical teaching in the most difficult and life-threatening of circumstances. All ministry is diaconal, earthed in a consistent, committed care of the Church after the manner of Jesus, the homeless rabbi who redefined leadership in terms of service, made the towel a symbol of authority and lived as the servant who gave his life as a ransom for many. So intrinsic was diakonia to the identity of the Church that its first ordination service was for seven people, ‘full of the Holy Spirit and of wisdom’ appointed to serve the Jerusalem church by taking a particular responsibility for the care of its widows (Acts 6:1–6). And from the fourth century it became increasingly normal for presbyters to be first ordained deacons, underlining that service remains the basis of all ministry.

The second feature of Paul’s time in Ephesus that is worth noting follows as a natural consequence of his dedicated diakonia: his tears. Paul had ministered with tears (Acts 20:19, 31). It had been painful to build the Church in Ephesus, there were dimensions of its culture that were deeply unaccommodating to the gospel. And after all they had been through together it was a painful process for Paul and the elders to bid their farewells to each other (Acts 20:37), intensified by the uncertainty that faced them all. Again the example of Jesus was the backdrop to their ministry. His self-depiction as a servant of others was a conscious adoption of the suffering servant motif in the Isaianic prophecies. Jesus knew that to serve the people in the messianic ministry of God’s new order carried with it the mantle of suffering. Servanthood and suffering were yoked together as surely as motherhood and the pain of labour in the birth of God’s kingdom.

When the Polish priest, Maximillian Kolbe, confessed to a crime he had not committed to save another person from death in a Nazi concentration camp, he was stepping into the footprints of Jesus, the suffering servant, and joining the many martyrs of every century who have been ready to follow the logic of Christian diakonia.

Third, Paul shows a radical dependence on the Holy Spirit. We saw earlier how his time in Ephesus was marked by dramatic activity of the Spirit. Now, in his farewell to the elders, he describes himself as ‘captive to the Spirit’ (Acts 20:23), hints at his attentiveness to the voice of the Spirit guiding and leading him to new opportunities for ministry and reminds them it is the Holy Spirit who has made them overseers in the Church. I remember speaking to John Wimber, another extraordinary church planter, about the dynamic of the Church’s ministry. Describing the way that throughout the book of Acts the Spirit guides, enables and orders the life of the Church, he said, ‘we need an ecclesiology that recognizes the Spirit as the true administrator of the Church’. Sitting in St Paul’s Cathedral some years later while attending a consecration of a bishop, I was reminded of our conversation and his challenge when I heard the Archbishop of Canterbury quote from Acts 20:28 in the ordination liturgy as he handed the new bishop his pastoral staff: ‘Keep watch over the whole flock in which the Holy Spirit has appointed you shepherd’. At its best, Anglican ecclesiology is profoundly pneumatological, and its liturgy prays what it once agreed in dialogue with the Eastern Orthodox Churches, ‘the Church is that Community which lives by continually invoking the Holy Spirit’.8 Only ministry that is empowered by the Spirit can claim to be sharing in the ministry of Jesus the Christos, the anointed one.

The exhortation in 1 Peter 5 to the presbyters in other churches in Turkey is remarkably similar to Paul’s advice to the Ephesian elders. They are instructed to ‘tend the flock in their charge (kleros)’, to exercise ‘the oversight’ and to be ‘examples’ to those in their care. The mention of the kleros is interesting. It is the word from which we derive our word clergy, which is generally but quite unhelpfully used to distinguish the ordained from the laity. Of course, the presbyters were as much a part of the laos as every other member of the body of Christ. Laos simply means ‘people’ and strictly refers to all God’s people, whatever their particular ministry. The kleros of the presbyters is not a right of privilege but a rite of responsibility. Within the laos, the people of God, the presbyters are given a particular kleros, a charge or responsibility, literally a ‘lot’. As Acts 20:28 reminds us, it is a charge of immense value, it is the care of ‘the Church of God that he obtained with the blood of his own Son’. Presbyters are not a caste outside the laos, they are a category within the laos. They are members of the laos who are placed in a particular pastoral relation to other members of the laos. It is not a position that gives them any right to ‘lord it over the people’ (1 Peter 5:3), rather it places on them the pattern of the ‘chief shepherd’ (1 Peter 5:4) Christ’s servanthood. The spirit of 1 Peter 5 and Acts 20 is well expressed in the bishop’s words to those about to be ordained priest in the Anglican Ordinal (1550/1662):

Have always therefore printed in your remembrance, how great a treasure is committed to your charge. For they are the sheep of Christ, which he bought with his death, and for whom he shed his blood. The Church and Congregation whom you must serve, is his Spouse, and his Body.9

We said at the beginning of the chapter that Christian identity is fundamentally relational. We concentrated on the believer’s relation to Christ and on the calling to follow him in ministry. The place of the presbyters in the people of God helps us to see the interrelationality between all the members of the body and its different ministries. Presbyters are defined by their relationship to other members of the laos. Their calling by Christ and their appointment by the Holy Spirit into this ministry among the people is an ecclesial event. It happens as the Church recognizes its need and discerns the call of God upon these people. Their ministry is given to them and received from them by the Church. Within this overall context of calling, consent and collaboration, presbyters are related to other specific ministries in the life of the Church. In the New Testament communities they have a derivative relation to the apostles. This is not to say that every elder was appointed by an apostle, though some were. It is rather a case of the ministry of presbyters being part of the apostles’ plan for preserving the integrity of the newly planted communities and for propagating their life. The future of the delicate shoots of new life depended on the dynamics of grace by which they were founded. The apostolic gospel holds within it the genetic information for the health and growth of the churches. The presbyters were to serve these generative capacities of the apostolic faith in the way gardeners work to ensure that what is sown is allowed to grow with its natural energies (Titus 1:9).

In some church communities there were deacons – Philip in Jerusalem, Phoebe in Rome and those referred to in the letter to Timothy probably in a number of churches in Turkey. Several other distinctive ministries can be observed in various New Testament communities, such as prophets and evangelists, and all sorts of other giftings such as healing and hospitality, compassionate care and generous giving, operated among the people in a common experience of life in Christ’s body. Presbyters fitted into this network of ministry, each ministry finding its place in relation to the other. ‘A fundamental principle of Christianity is that of social dependence,’ said Charles Gore.10 Each person, though uniquely gifted and equally privileged to stand and serve in God’s presence, is dependent on the ministries of others, not only to give to God but to receive from God. The co-inherence of one ministry in another is a profound manifestation of the recovery of God’s image in Christian existence. It is evidence of our participation in the Trinitarian life of God in which each divine person lives in and through the other, for the other in the ultimate pattern of priestly identity.

No doubt there were differences in structure of ministry from church to church in the New Testament period and it is quite possible that presbyters appeared on the church scene earlier in some places than in others. Probably there was some tension between the more spontaneous giftings and ministries of the Spirit discovered by Christians as they worshipped and witnessed together and their more formally designated office. We are not attempting a watertight historical case or trying to prove a pattern of ministry established in the early life of the Church that can just be lifted out of that time and transplanted into our time. The New Testament is far too interesting and complex for that sort of treatment, and the history of the Church is littered with too many failed attempts to do so. Certainly a brief survey like this needs to be nuanced and refined in all sorts of ways. But it does seem difficult to deny that the first century of the Church’s life was generally familiar with the ministry of presbyters in its interconnected life. And they were most definitely part of the warp and weave of the second-century Church and beyond.

The relationship between presbyters and other members of the people of God is one of the most significant aspects of the ordination liturgies of the Church.11 Our earliest example comes from the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, an influential manual of church order probably originating from Rome in the third century. The ordination liturgy of the Apostolic Tradition, and other early sources show a carefully balanced ecology between presbyter and people. Ordinations are ecclesial events in which the interdependence between presbyter and people is expressed at a number of points, not least in the basic requirement that each presbyter is ordained to a particular Christian community. This is the origin of the ‘title parish’ to which Anglicans are ordained today. There is no such thing as an ‘absolute ordination’, a conferral of position in the Church abstracted from the realities of service within a local community of Christians.

The two critical moments in the early rites were the election of the presbyter and the equipping of the presbyter with the needful gifts for ministry through prayer and the laying on of hands. The election was not a modern democratic process but it was a formal recognition by the people that the candidate for ordination had been called by God and would be received by them. The fourth-century Canons of Hippolytus invite the people to declare ‘we choose him’ and in the Apostolic Constitutions, the people were asked three times whether they believed that the person was worthy to be ordained. ‘Axios’, ‘He is worthy’, would have been their reply, though we know that when Demophilos, a follower of Arius’ teaching, was appointed bishop of Constantinople in 370 AD some of the people cried out ‘Anaxios’, ‘He is not worthy!’ In Rome things were more restrained. A statement was read to the people on the Wednesday and Thursday before the ordinations and then by the pope at the ordination itself inviting them to declare any objection to the ordinations – a sort of publishing the banns of ordination – and if silence was kept the ordination could go ahead.

Although it was the bishop who prayed the ordination prayer and who, accompanied by other presbyters, laid hands on the candidates, the action was seen very much as the work of the Church. It was preceded by the prayers of the people in which they called upon God to equip the candidate with the particular gifts needed for this new ministry, and the bishop was seen to be speaking on behalf of the Church when he prayed:

God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, look upon this your servant, and impart the Spirit of grace and counsel of the presbyterate, that he may help and govern your people with a pure heart . . .12

These words from the Apostolic Tradition reappear in several other ordination prayers through the centuries. Helping and governing God’s people with the grace and counsel of the Spirit and with a pure heart is the calling of the presbyters. They are to ‘shepherd the people blamelessly’ (Canons of Hippolytus) and to be their steward (Sacramentary of Serapion) as ‘an instrument of the Holy Spirit always having and bearing the cross of [God’s] only begotten Son’ (Testamentum Domini). These various images from a number of fourth-century ordination prayers and the relationship they envisage between the presbyter and other members of God’s people are succinctly gathered together in the Apostolic Constitutions:

O God . . . now look upon your holy Church and increase it, and multiply those who preside in it and give them strength that they may labour in word and deed for the building up of your people.13

Presbyters are to preside over the priestly people of God and to labour (as later eastern prayers put it) for ‘the edification and perfecting of [the] saints’. Very much in the spirit of these ordination prayers, John Chrysostom, the brilliant fourth-century preacher and author of On the Priesthood, one of the pastoral treasures of the theological tradition, said that priests ‘must consider one end only, the edification of the Church’:

For the Church is Christ’s own body . . . and [those] who are entrusted with the task of developing it into health and beauty should look round at every point, lest there be a spot or wrinkle, or any other blemish, marring its bloom and comeliness, and in short should make it worthy, so far as lies within human power, of the pure and blessed Head which it possesses.14

John likens the priest to a parent bringing life to birth or to a navigator of a ship guiding ‘a ship to safety in the midst of a stormy sea’ and makes much of the image in Matthew 24:25 of the ‘faithful and wise slave, whom his master put in charge of his household’ to protect and prosper them.15 We will return to these and other images of presbyteral ministry in the next chapter.

The early ordination liturgies, and the accompanying voices of the fourth century, give some precision to the interdependence between presbyter and people that we see in the New Testament. The presbyter needs the people to be a presbyter. The people need a presbyter to be the people of God. The one, as Daniel Hardy puts it, interanimates the other. This is not to fall into a crudely functional notion of ordination, as though people are only ordained to the extent that they are performing presbyteral activities. Neither is it to imply a clericalized understanding of the Church in which the Church can only be present and active when authenticated by the ordained. But it is to say that presbyters are ordained to serve the ‘health and beauty’ of the Church and that the ‘bloom and comeliness’ of the Church requires the sort of presiding ministry that presbyters are called to exercise. The particular pastoral responsibility laid upon the presbyter is to see that the Church grows into its natural form – the priestly body of Christ, a community embodying and demonstrating the with-other-ness and for-other-ness of God’s life of love.

We will think more about the presiding ministry of the presbyters and their animation of the people of God in the next chapter. At the close of this one, there are three further points worth noting from the early ordination liturgies. The first is that the ministry of presbyters is closely related to the ministry of deacons and bishops. The early western ordination prayers are the most explicit about the relationship between bishops and presbyters, even to the point of unhelpfully calling presbyters a ‘lesser order’ and ‘secondary preachers’, but all the early liturgies assume a closely connected ministry between the two orders. The ministry of deacons is also assumed in the liturgies and two eastern ordination prayers refer to the complementary ministry of prophets and teachers who also share in the building up of the Church. Second, the prayers, especially the eastern ones, have a strong emphasis on the work of the Spirit not only in the ordination service but throughout the ministry of the ordained. ‘Ordain . . . Lord, by the coming of your Holy Spirit’, one prayer implores; several others ask for ‘the great gift of your Holy Spirit’. The prayers recognize that the Spirit is not only the source of the presbyter’s gifts for ministry but is also the gift that will be imparted through the presbyter’s ministry. The Spirit is invoked as the people gather around the bishop to ordain the presbyter in the ordination liturgy so that the presbyter can invoke the Spirit on the people in other liturgies of the Church:

May [your servant] be worthy and meet to call down your Holy Spirit from heaven for the spiritual quickening of those who are born over again in the luminous font.16

In similar language John Chrysostom compared presbyters at the Eucharist to Elijah on Mount Carmel and concluded that they ‘stand bringing down not fire, but the Holy Spirit . . . [to] kindle the souls of all, and make them appear brighter than silver refined by fire’.17

The third consistent feature of the ordination prayers, eastern and western, is the calling on the presbyter to live a holy life that will be an example to the Church. This is an expectation that we saw in 1 Peter 5 and Acts 20 and which is never far away from any mention of the designated ministries in the New Testament. The ordination prayers continue the theme, and the Canons of Hippolytus ask God to make the life of the presbyter ‘higher than that of all his people, without dispute’ and ‘envied by reason of his virtue by everyone’. The bishop’s charge in the contemporary Roman rite puts it more positively: ‘Let the holiness of your lives be a delight to Christ’s faithful, so that by word and example you may build up the house which is God’s Church.’ Later the bishop prays, in words almost identical to those found in our most ancient version of the Roman rite’s ordination prayer dating from the eighth century, that God will ‘renew within them the Spirit of holiness’.18

Notes

1 Rosalind Brown. Copyright © 1989 Rosalind Brown. Tune: Diademata. Published in Rosalind Brown, Jeremy Davies and Ron Green, Sing! New Words for Worship, Salisbury: Sarum College Press 2004.

2 Rowan Williams, A Ray of Darkness, Cambridge MA: Cowley 1995, p. 157.

3 See, for example, Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, London: Fount 1998.

4 R. C. Moberly, Ministerial Priesthood, London: John Murray 1919, p. 256.

5 See David Ford, Self and Salvation: Being Transformed, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999.

6 Ford, Self and Salvation, p. 159.

7 The Council for Christian Unity, The Porvoo Common Statement, London: CCU 1994.

8 Anglican–Orthodox Dialogue: The Moscow Statement (eds, Kallistos Ware and Colin Davey) London: SPCK 1977, p. 91.

9 Although the Anglican Ordinal is bound into the covers of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, it is strictly speaking a separate document, which was first published in 1550 and then later revised. For these reasons we will refer to it as ‘1550/1662’.

10 Charles Gore, The Christian Ministry, London: Rivingtons 1889, p. 94.

11 Early ordination liturgies can be found in Paul Bradshaw, Ordination Rites of the Ancient Churches of East and West, New York: Pueblo Publishing Company 1990.

12 See Bradshaw, Ordination Rites of the Ancient Churches, p. 108.

13 See Bradshaw, Ordination Rites of the Ancient Churches, p. 115.

14 St Chrysostom on the Priesthood (ed. Allen Moxon), London: SPCK 1907, p. 111.

15 On the Priesthood, p. 150 and pp. 40–2.

16 From the Armenian Ordination Prayer, see Bradshaw, Ordination Rites of the Ancient Churches, p. 131.

17 On the Priesthood, p. 63.

18 This is from the English translation of the ‘Second Typical Edition’ of the Roman Catholic Rite of Ordination of a Priest.