In any case, this charge about the isolation of the church from the world cuts both ways. Yet any of them, pushed beyond a certain point, tends to falsify the situation of the ministry today.
Ferment in the Ministry by Seward Hiltner
The Ministry Situation
The Nature of the Ministry
It tended to emphasize ministry as preaching the Word of God, and sometimes became irrelevantly verbose in the process. It has many temptations, to which everyone in the history of the church has fallen.
The Functions of the Ministry
The Ministry as Preaching
Perhaps the priest in the medieval statue had an inflated idea of the strength of his knees. It shows his belief that the goals will come if there is faithful attention to the communication of the Word.
The Ministry as Administering
We can symbolize this by the cartoon image of the minister with his sleeves rolled up cranking up the mimeograph machine. No necessary function in the life of the church is foreign to him or too low under special circumstances. Second, it almost goes without saying that the members of the group are all represented at the same level.
Perhaps one might wish to make something of the minister's position a little behind the laity. The unique aspect of the current image comes from the moment of the reformation of the universal priesthood and Christian calling. A minister and two other Christians, with the minister's hands on the others' shoulders, all facing the same direction.
Of all the aspects of ministry, administration is that in which the assessment of the minister is the most open and unconcealed.
The Ministry as Teaching
The best account available of this kind of ministry practice is contained in Richard Baxter's The Reformed Pastor, published in the mid-seventeenth century. By sometime in the nineteenth century I suggest that the image in fashion of the minister as teacher was something like this. A proper examination is therefore a part of the learning process and not merely a formal testing of what has been achieved so far.
In the previous section, building on the activities of the Reformation, I suggested that the image of instructing the instructors is valid. I'm not sure when this began to happen on a large scale - probably not until the second half of the nineteenth century - but the image of the real teacher of children became the motherly person in Sunday school. The image of the maternal person actually trying to get it into the boys' heads was an improvement over the frock coat image in some obvious ways.
For the sake of convenience, the site of the minister's teaching efforts has thus far been assumed to be the local church or some extension.
The Ministry as Shepherding
Counseling and Psychotherapy, published in the early 1940s and read by many ministers, has also contributed to the use of the interview image. So it was a move away from the interview image and toward the shepherd image, although it would be another six to eight years before I fully developed the latter. The fundamental purpose of any defensible form of the pastoral image is to make the shepherd's helping care relevant in some way to the need of the sheep.
If it can be made clear in the cartoon that the help offered meets the needs of the sheep, then the image has a real chance of making its point. We can look further at the image of the kneeling shepherd removing blackberries from the sheep. So it is both possible and necessary to use the old-fashioned shepherd image.
But if this image is used as a sub-image of the clinical picture, it can be of great positive importance.
The Ministry as Evangelizing
I tried to think of the image of this still nascent but emerging conception of evangelism. But true dialogue is the intention, although not without conviction on the part of the minister. They must heal the sick and declare the presence of the Kingdom of God.
Everyone is on the same level, but in a cartoon image the moderating function of the minister can. On the side of the overall relationship between the minister and the group, it is clear that the movement is dynamic (energetic and conflictual) and not completely predictable in advance. I agree with all the literature that proclaims the importance of this lay ministry in the world.
I think it is high time that we take the evangelistic work out of the theological basement.
The Ministry as Celebrating
They are responsible representatives of the people, just as a priest should be a responsible representative of Jesus Christ. If we were completely consistent, we would call an ordained priest at the celebration of the Lord's Supper a. But men must feel complicit in the enormity and agony of the sacrifice.
The sacrament of the altar does not so much suppress this human tendency as channel and move it. It contains no hint of participation in sacrifice except in the form of the highly symbolic elements. Our central image has nothing to say against this interpretation, and something for it in the form of the visible symbols of bread, wine and table.
Legitimate variety as well as creative novelty seems as important as awareness of the roots.
The Ministry as Reconciling
But the actuality of human actions and ministry is not simply a mirror image of the life of Jesus even as the Christ. The image of the hammer looks better than that of the handshake or the irene arms. Even if people are brought into the same room, there may be none of the attitude that can start with point 1 and lead forward in the process.
She does most of the first conversation, all about what's wrong with her husband. Very well, he got carried away; but he did come – and that is part of the factual situation. But in terms of many of our culture's most aggravated conflict situations, these are the very first.
Why shouldn't it be the minister's job to tell his church's experts, "Talk seriously to Islam."
The Ministry as Theologizing
The evidence of what this emphasis on the minister as theologian has done is very widespread in the history of the past four centuries. He might also have been suspicious of all the other books in the established clergyman's study because they jeopardized the sufficiency of the Bible. If service is like service, then that seems to be the image rejected by this part of the continental tradition.
In America the minister's reluctance to be a theologian is also a product of the anti-intellectual aspects of American culture. But the gist of the image was that the Bible, or the Word of God through the Bible, struck the servant as he read. This suggests that the modern ministry is not technically limited to the technologies of the past.
Even if we go to the various specialist images of the theologian, we remain in the realm of passivity.
The Ministry as Disciplining
Although the priest does not in the prayer stand actually see these symbolic problems in the world, he can be shown in that direction. Presenting the priest alone in this picture is for the same reasons as in the picture of the priest as theologian. I am certainly not against the minister's duties to and pleasures with his wife and children.
Is the minister in step with the technical tools in development, or does he despise them all? For the minister, this is not an easy way out of the functions he does not like. In general, what all this says to the minister's duty is: You can discipline life only by encouraging self-discipline.
The purpose of the minister's disciplining others in life is exactly as Joseph Fletcher has said: to teach people to use the ultimate criterion of love in the present situation in making their decisions.
The Integrity of the Ministry
New Forms of Ministry
His work was also a project of the Boisen movement for clinical education of the clergy. Some of the free-floating experimental centers run by ministers seem to be doing good work. Ultimately refusing to cooperate with local "social workers," who appear to him to be of the Establishment, he has.
But there is a kind of underground bias against them as a group from the dominant middle-aged population. In the end, the church ministry will therefore cooperate in these areas with the patterns that society has set up to deal with them. No namby-pamby about either authority or responsibility - but a final disappearance of the lone-wolf image of ministry.
The temptation for a minister who has qualified for pastoral counseling has to do with money.
The Unity of the Ministry
It may be a legacy of my early dedication to a specialized form of ministry that makes me try to articulate and elaborate on this and not just take it for granted. And of course I knew all along that the nine types of positions selected for consideration were not exhaustive for the ministry. While no explicit feedback arrangement is shown in the picture, the authority of the minister's interpretation of the Word depends on his dedication and ability and is not beyond doubt by those who hear.
Of course there are also differences, some shown in the images themselves and others only in the full feature photo. One or two pictures showed anxious, belligerent or "who-do-you-think-you" expressions. These common elements of the images seem to me enough to suggest that there must be some kind of unity of ministry - although in analyzing these limited images it is also clear that we cannot literally move from one image to another without allowing for context and particularity.
Reconciling is not getting unanimity, so teaching in some artificial one-way sense is the order of the day hereafter.
