The Church and Its Ministry

David Willis is a very good friend and I appreciate those very gracious words. There is no greater joy than the communion of the saints in the theological enterprise of the church in which you do not have to agree but in which you do have to discuss with passion and with integrity the theological issues before the church. My longtime and good friend Pat Miller has just assured me that when he gets up and leaves it will not be because of disagreement. I told him I couldn't be too sure about that, but in any case we alike belong to the communion of saints and to the church, and I assume he is going to teach Hebrew. I do not claim any more from what I shall be saying this week than that this is a reflection of one who has lived now for considerable time in the life of the church.

I took pride once in being able to say that I had been a pastor for 14 years longer than I taught in the seminary but now I've taught in the seminary twice as long as I was a pastor, and I'm not sure what the consequence of that is. It's not good, let me say in the beginning, there is only one honest work in the church and that's being passed of a congregation. And if you're doing something else, the obligation is upon you to justify and to explain why you're doing something else, especially at the expense of the church. And therefore I do not resent it when Orange Presbyterian have asked me each year to justify how I can be a minister in the Presbyterian church and teach at Union Theological Seminary. I think they're right in asking me to justify how I can be a minister and not be pastor of a local church.

The Church and the Ministry

Well today, a second lecture that's somewhat preliminary to our primary concerns with preaching, teaching, and pastoral care and the Christian witness in the world, the church and the ministry. There are two reasons why discussion of the renewal of the church should begin with a discussion of the church and a discussion of the ministry. The first is the observable situation in the church in our society, and the second is the example of the renewal of the revival of the church in the Protestant Reformation. A very striking observable fact about the church in our time is the obvious decline and the obvious growth of churches, both congregations and denominations, in the same communities. Why, for example, are some downtown churches stronger today in quantifiable terms than they have ever been in their history, while other downtown churches have difficulty maintaining their existence?

Why is it that Presbyterian churches, which traditionally have emphasized the life of the mind in the service of God and an intelligent, trained ministry, why have Presbyterian churches been so ineffective in a society in which there are so many colleges and universities and so many university graduates. That, incidentally, is a very interesting question. With a great increase in college graduates, why has the Presbyterian Church not prospered? Contemporary society has many characteristics, but it also gives evidence of great religious yearning and puzzlement as well as religious enthusiasm. And why is it that in such a society which is both religious and secular. Some churches thrive and others die. Turning to the Reformation, historians have uncovered many factors, some social, some political, some economic, which influence the origin and development of the Protestant Reformation.

The Precedent of the Reformation

Two of the more persuasive explanations of the Reformation have to do, however, with the church and its ministry. and they are very similar to the problems which we experience today. Reformation was, at least some of us believe, a religious revival which set back the secularization of Europe for a century and a half and made faith, religion, once again the primary concern not only of ordinary people but of princes of the emerging business class. Its origin was, on the one hand, in the bruised spirits and the wounded consciences of people, and on the other hand, in the failure of the structures of medieval Catholicism to mediate the grace of God to those bruised spirits and wounded consciences. Many factors contributed to the Reformation, psychological, social, economic, class conflict, political, but there is no satisfactory account of either the work of Martin Luther or Ulrich Zwingli or John Calvin apart from faith.

They spoke out of faith and their words mediated the grace of God, or at least so they and those who heard them believed, to countless people. The Reformation has to be understood, first of all, as an event of faith. Calvin understood the basic human problem to be not social, not political, not economic, but theological. And they set about to give a theological answer to the human problem, which was itself theological. And in so doing, and in In giving a theological answer to a theological problem, they mightily shape history. They mightily reform society. United States of America is a different society from what it would have been, a different nation from what it would have been because the Protestant Reformation happened. This is a suggestion that if we want to change society, the best way is not through direct action, but in the church being the church giving theological answers to theological problems.

Herbert Butterfield, a very great historian, one of the greatest modern historians, in a very interesting essay observed that the church has influenced and shaped society most, Not when it was directly concerned to shape society, but when it was primarily concerned to be the church. He goes on to say in words which always aroused a response, but which deserved deep pondering. The church has influenced society, Butterfield says, more when it has been primarily concerned with the salvation of souls than it has when it has been primarily concerned with shaping society. As I've indicated, many contemporary studies of the Reformation have emphasized the importance of social factors, and some have emphasized the urbanization of life, other social tensions between the classes, and other social groups.

A recent study by Robert Kingdon has emphasized that the Reformation was indeed a social revolution, but that its main target was the Roman Catholic clergy, a highly privileged social elite. It was thus an anti-clerical revolution. He further argues that a main social result of the Reformation was the creation of a new clerical class, and elite of a very different type. Prior to the Reformation in Geneva, there was a total of 400 or more persons attached to the church, including members of religious orders, 100 members of the cathedral staff in actual residence, and between 100 and 200 seculars attached to the seven parishes, and a number of chaplances and hospitals. If one adds the lay employees of the church, the total comes to 1,000. This number was radically reduced in the Protestant church.

During Calvin's lifetime, the Protestant ministers buried from 9 to 22. Kingdon notes that this radical decline, radical reduction in the clergy, or the church bureaucracy, as we would call it, is in some sense misleading. For many of the pre-Reformation Catholic clergy included people not involved in the cure of souls or in basically religious functions. Nevertheless, this tremendous decrease in what we would today call the bureaucratic structure of the church was very significant, and one can understand quite well why the city council was enthusiastic about it. The Reformation in Geneva was therefore ecclesiological as well as theological. The theology and the ecclesiology were a like determinative of the future life of the church. A recent study of the Reformation in Scotland by Jenny Wormald, W-O-R-M-A-L-D., has suggested that the Reformation in Scotland offered not a new faith, the faith continued in many ways to be very much as it had been, but a new alternative in the shape and the face of the church.

There were two principles, she suggests, on which the reformers in Scotland were uncompromising. The first was no compromise as the hierarchy, the parity of the ministry, the parity of the members of the church. Now it's impossible to eliminate all hierarchy in any social group, but to an amazing degree the church in Scotland emphasized, at least in the beginning, there was to be no hierarchy. The other was no compromise in regard to the ministry. All miles suggest, as Calvin would later say, and I will indicate, that they spun the notion of the priesthood as a living. The ministry is not a living but a calling, a calling which requires a high degree of competence, and on this, the Reformation in Scotland was uncompromising, unless there were ministers, at least in the earlier days, who were competent, who were committed, then they would do without ministers.

A Calling, Not a Living

It was either a competent, dedicated ministry or no ministry at all. There are grounds, therefore, in the disparate history of congregations and denominations in our society, and also in the precedent of the Reformation to begin a consideration of the renewal of the Presbyterian Church, in particular in our time, with a discussion of the ministry and the church itself. Two discernible trends in contemporary church life, one having to do with the ministry and the other with the church, have left their marks on mainline Protestant churches. The first is the changed understanding of the task of the ministry, and the other is the bureaucratization of the church. Each trend departs from the classic understanding of the church and the ministry. The first Protestants were quite clear that the task of the minister is to preach, teach, and administer the sacraments, and to exercise pastoral care in the light of the word of God in a particular congregation in which the minister was risen.

The church was understood to be the Christian people, the priesthood of believers, constituted by the hearing and the receiving of the word of God, which alone is necessary for the existence of the church. Two emphases in John Calvin's understanding of the minister stand in sharp contrast to trends in the life of the church today. The first, Calvin specifically set the vocation of the pastor in contrast to priestly livings and to the notion of a benefits. For Calvin, the pastor is a calling, not a living, a stewardship, not a benefit. knew that it is fair and sanctioned by the law of God that those who work for the church be supported at public expense. Yet ministers should give an example of frugality to others and should not have so much as to abuse it to the point of luxury and indulgence, but only enough to meet their needs.

Moderation was one of Calvin's favorite words and he applied it repeatedly to the ministry. Simplicity was a great virtue and again he applied it, repeated it to the minister and the minister's work. Calvin was not an aesthetic. His emphasis was on frugality and simplicity. Now it's difficult to define in quantitative ways the line between compensation, which is appropriate to simple approval living and compensation which makes ministers an elite privileged group between what is necessary to maintain the effectiveness of the work of a minister and what undermines the effectiveness of the work of the minister. The question is very difficult as Reinhold Niebuhr like to point out in his leaves of the notebook of a tame cynic as he faced this question as he was past of a church.

Payment and the Work of Ministry

The question is difficult because there There is a basic incongruity, a basic dissonance between preaching the gospel, administering the sacraments, and exercising pastoral care, and being paid to do so. Powell himself acknowledged something of this incongruity in that while he spoke of the entitlement of the minister to support, he himself earned his own living. Protestants used to underscore the peculiar nature of the ministry by the refusal to accept payments or gifts for baptisms or funerals. And insofar as that practice is broken today, I think it is very unfortunate. The practice broke down long ago on weddings. But traditionally, the minister, when ministers were all male, modified the practice by publicly making a case for giving the fee for the wedding or the gift for the wedding, passing it on to the wife.

Through it all, there were ministers who considered weddings also a service that was freely given by the church. If the minister was paid a salary, all the services of the church were free and open to all who needed them. This was a basic and fundamental practice. I remember 1943, being in Mobile, Alabama, and being the low person on the totem pole, I was called out frequently to have funerals for people who were there without any family connection and once in Mobile. And once I was called for the funeral and of the mother of the person who built the a mobile tunnel. And this person wanted to give me a $25 gift for having that funeral. And this created a real crisis in my life. I didn't know what to do with it. And it does not represent progress that it would not create that kind of crisis today, though I don't think I would take it.

But it would not have been something like touching the Ark of the covenant as it was then. We finally resolved that by, he was very insistent, and we finally resolved it by having him send that contribution to J. McDowell Richards, who was president of the Columbia Seminary, for the training of ministers. This was not a moral achievement on my part. This was simply part of the culture in which, church culture, which I grew up in which to have accepted money for a funeral would have been the ancient equivalent of touching the ark. How we can settle this problem, I do not know. Perhaps the best thing to say is that we must keep attention between the preaching of the gospel on the one hand and receiving a salary for it. There are two checks, I think, however.

We who are ministers ought to strive that we shall bring to the ministry the same competence and the same dedication which we witness on the part of the best lawyers and the best doctors and the best business people in the communities in which we serve. I stand in awe in the presence of what the best lawyers in the city of Richmond do in in terms of competence and the hours they work. Of course, we don't have the problem of dealing with three and four and $500,000 salaries, but that's their problem. But they do not get those salaries without demonstrated competence. The other test that we can put is the free service that we give to the church. I again stand in awe when I see the service, the time, the energy, the work, which very busy business people, professional people give in the life of the church.

We ought to be sure as ministers that we are giving as much of our time over and beyond that for which we are paid to the life of the church as the best church members in our congregation are giving. Well, this problem has never been easy, and even before ministers were paid good salaries as they are by and large today, the ministry was demeaned by special discounts, special privileges, and special gifts. The conclusion of the matter is that the minister must learn to live in some way as though he had but did not have a salary. To learn to live with the simplicity of faith even though he may properly be paid a salary above the average in the congregation, indeed that's one of the problems. Almost all ministers make a salary above the average salary in the congregation and it it is very difficult to minister to people who are making less salary than you do.

But we need to keep alive the tension and to know the difference between a calling and a living. What calling has to do with something more than salaries and privileges and retirement plans, there is a fundamental difference between a person who has a job and a person who has a calling. We've always emphasized this in Protestantism for life generally, but it comes to focus in the ministry. The ministry is a calling to proclaim the grace and the mercy of God in Jesus Christ, to teach the faith, to exercise pastoral care, and to do this not only when it is personally and convenient, but when there is little encouragement from the congregation or the community. Congregations come to know with amazing perception and very quickly, even though they cannot articulate it, the difference between a pastor who has a job and the pastor who has a calling.

Between the pastor who is primarily concerned with the maintenance of his own career and the past whose primary concern is the well-being of the congregation. On the human level, few factors are as important in increasing or decreasing the effectiveness of a minister as its perception. The ministry is not primarily a way of self-fulfillment. It is a way of fulfilling the purposes of God. The desire for self-fulfillment may in all circumstances be self-defeating, but in the ministry it is emphatically so. Self-fulfillment always comes as a byproduct of fulfilling one's calling. Yet the minister, let us say quite clearly, is saved by grace through faith in the work of the ministry as well as in personal life. What then is the calling of the minister?

The Calling to Be a Pastor

The calling of the minister is to be a pastor in the comprehensive sense of that word. In our baptism we are called and we are ordained to do good things, to offer services which enhance human life. One of the problems in the life of the church today is that we confuse the ordination of baptism to ministry and the ordination to the ministry of the word and sacraments. The ministry of the word and sacraments is is not to the Christian life, but to the performance of certain functions in the life of the Christian community. Christian faith and Christian commitment are presupposed. This calling to be a pastor is quite specific, namely to be the pastor of a particular congregation or the work of a missionary establishing some new congregation.

Calvin quotes with approval the action of the Council of Chalcedon when it enacted that there should be no automation free of pastoral obligations. That is a place to be assigned to the person ordained where he is to exercise his office. He and his in that day. This decree is very valuable Calvin said for two reasons. First that the church may not be burdened with needless expense and spend upon idle men what ought to distributed to the poor. Secondly, that those ordained are not to think of themselves promoted to an honor but charged to an office which they are with solid attestation obligated to discharge. Calvin and other Protestants sought to reform the church by insisting that the past live in the midst of the congregation and that the pastor exercised the responsibilities of preaching, teaching, and pastoral care.

Martin Luther, in the Babylonian captivity of the church, spoke of the work of the minister in functional terms. The whole church, the priesthood of all believers, has the responsibility for preaching, the administration of the sacraments, teaching, and pastoral care. In order for these functions to be performed with competence, with order, certain persons are called, trained, certified to carry out these responsibilities. Luther envisioned the possibility of the ministry as a temporary vocation. We no longer, when a person no longer performed the functions, one gave up the artist. Calvin does not generally describe the ministry in functional terms. And he would have had great difficulty ever conceiving it as a temporary vocation. By the time Calvin appeared on the scene, to leave the ministry was like jumping ships and deserting the cause.

And the consequence is that Protestants practically, though without theological justification, gave to ordination to the ministry a kind of indelible character from which you cannot free yourself. Well, there is need, I think, to work out some compromise between that which was a consequence of Calvin's understanding of the ministry and Luther's. Hence, Calvin could dare to speak of the minister as a mouth of God, yet he knew that every minister is a sinner saved by the grace of God. He also knew that the ministry, while the gift of God to the church is not a status, not an honor, not a responsibility, not a power. It is a function which is critically important for the life of the church. The work of the minister is validated in the integrity and the competence with which the Protestant minister interprets the word of God and applies it in preaching, teaching, and pastoral care.

The Protestant minister has no other authority, no other honor, and no other dignity. The sum of the matter is that the pastor is important, not because of any status, but because of the functions of the pastor are critical for the life of the church. I've been habit of saving classes that you're not ordained to be a community good will person. And neither are you ordained to be a political activist, I would say today, but I was participating in an ordination service in Riverside Church, Jacksonville, Florida, for Arthur Ross, who's now pastor of the First this community. He takes them to buy their groceries, he takes them to the doctor, and so forth. But then Arthur Ross put it very well. He said, I do not object to a large church having a community goodwill person on its staff, but said, I do object to the fact that many people in this congregation think this is what I am being ordained to do today.

The Pastor's Normative Function

We need to be very clear that we are ordained to preach, to teach, and to exercise pastoral care, and not to do many good and wonderful things which we are ordained to do in our baptism. The church lives by the hearing and the receiving of the Word of God and by nothing else. In this sense the pastor is a normative function in the life of the church. Other functions have good and useful roles in the life of the church but none is so crucial as the work of the pastor who proclaims God's words, administers the sacraments, and exercises pastoral care. It is the work of the pastor which on the human level gathers congregations, calls people to be the church, and builds up the church as a worshiping, believing community. Protestantism has never said that the minister is essential for the being of the church, only its well-being.

We need to remind ourselves that churches can got along without ministers. The only thing essential for the being of the church is the Word of God. Where the Word of God is heard and received in faith and obeyed in love, there is the church. Nothing else is essential. It's very important for us to understand that I think today because it's so easy to have a false understanding of the church. In light of things I will say later, the temptation to think of the church as some great corporation like General Motors which has an abundance of jobs to which we are entitled but the church is not an incorporate and not a corporation the church is a community and in a real sense a minister has to create his or her job in a real sense minister has to build the church.

If I were a czar, which I'm glad I'm not, and it's good for the church I'm not, but I would prohibit first seminary students leaving the seminary and going to be on the staff of large churches where there are janitors and secretaries and all kinds of staff because it gives a false, a false image of what the church is. The church is a community and one learns that if one goes to a very small church where nothing happens frequently if the minister does not do it. Then you learn the reality of the church. I remember when I went to the seminary I was speaking to Roswell Long who was in charge of youth work and I would say my mother had put out on the kitchen table a statement from newspapers saying there were too many ministers now and where I would obviously read it and I guess that had me worried so I said something to him along that line.

He said a minister is never without a job. He said what is not absolutely true but has considerable truth in it. He says a minister can go out into a cornfield and start a church. The vision we need of the church is a community in which we give leadership in the coming into being of the church not a corporation which has jobs to which we have some claim. The The ministry of the college, as a service to preach, teach, and pastoral care, we need to recover that in our time. Let me say one word here, parenthetically. There was a time in America when in almost every American community, the Presbyterian ministry would be the best trained, the most effective person in that community. That is no longer true. We have great competition from lawyers, doctors, business people, and many other people in our society.

The Priesthood of All Believers

And therefore, we have to give attention to this task of the ministry of a calling, which is not a status and which is not authorized by any empowerment, but which depends on the human level, finally on our own effectiveness, our own competence to interpret and apply the Word of God human life in our time. Now coming a step further and turning to the church, Martin Luther like to exclaim that the curia is not the church, which would be equivalent to saying today the bureaucracy is not the church. He wanted to revise the Apostles' Creed to read, I believe there is a holy Christian people because he thought the word church had too much of an institutional sound The church is the priesthood of Believers Puritan Ancestors did not like to call the church the building of church But the rather they called it a meeting house the place where the church gathered the church is the people Luther and the Puritans alike understood the words of 1 Peter, you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, and you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who calls you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Once you were no people, but now you are God's people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. The doctrine of the priesthood of all believers did away with the distinction between priests people, clergy and people. The whole church is the clergy, the inheritance of the Lord. Calvin wished that those who were ministers were called by another title than clergy to indicate not a difference in status but a specific function to which they were called by the congregation. Every Christian believer is a priest who answers for himself or herself in the presence of God. Indeed that is not so much a privilege as a responsibility. Every person can confess sins directly to God and not necessarily to anyone else, and each Christian can hear a neighbor's confession and proclaim the promise of the gospel, the promise of forgiveness.

As Luther put it, every man must believe for himself because sooner or later every man dies by himself. There is nothing a Protestant minister can do for a dying person, which that person cannot, in principle, at least do for himself or herself. Luther was subject to the criticism that his emphasis upon the priesthood of all believers turned the church into an aggregation of individuals rather than a community. But Luther insisted that the Christian must be a Christ to the neighbor, and by this he meant that as God in Christ loves us, so we must love the neighbor. But he meant something more, however, as God in Christ has borne our sins, so we must bear our neighbor's sins. No Christian can be a spectator to the moral tragedy of another. To be a priest is to bear the neighbor's burden and the neighbor's guilt.

The church, therefore, can exist without ministers. The importance of the pastor is not status or place in the organizational structure, but the competence and good order of preaching, teaching, and pastoral care. In and of themselves, ministers have no greater importance or significance than any other member of the church. They do have or perform certain functions which are the responsibility of the congregation and which are crucially important for the well-being of the church. Calvin does not emphasize the priesthood of all believers as Luther did. I do not think he had it in himself personally to do that. The praise seldom occurs in his writings. The task of upbuilding the church in Calvin's day required ministers of competence, and it also required respect for the dignity and the significance of their work.

Calvin's concern was not to demote the status of the minister, but to enhance the status of the minister over against the city council and over against the Libertines in Geneva. His pressing task was the maintenance of the ministry, and in so doing, he sometimes made claims for the ministry which were extravagant. I really wish Calvin had had more to say about the priesthood of all believers, though one can find references throughout his works to the fact, if not the exact words. Yet the awareness that the church is the people, not the ministry, not the organization, persisted even in Calvinism. It was maintained in Puritanism and in the congregational polities of the Congregationalist and the Baptist. Unfortunately, the French Congregationalist Robert Kingdon, as pointed out, were in the wrong place on the night of St. Bartholomew's massacre, and therefore the Presbyterians were given, the strict Presbyterians were given an edge due to the Catholics, not the internal polity of the church.

How different the polity might have been if the Presbyterians had been where the Congregationalists were and the Congregationalists had been where the Presbyterians were. Yet the awareness that the church is a people still is a process. It is reasserted in the church renewal which have invigorated the church for the last several centuries. The renewals have taken place in churches which are people's churches. A recent study of Scotch-Irish piety and the great awakening of 1625 to 1760 was entitled The Triumph of the Laity. The conditions of American church life up through the 19th century enhance the role of the laity and the local congregation. It encouraged ministers to act on their own. For example, Sheldon Jackson's missionary activities, which established the Presbyterian Church in Alaska, could never have been condoned in the Presbyterian Church today.

Sheldon Jackson would find himself very much in trouble with the Presbyterian. Many churches, that is local congregations and many institutions, which are very important in the work of the church today, would not now be impossible with the increasingly tightly organized character of American Presbyterianism. Many of the early churches were organized by lay people. The church in which I grew up was organized by lay people without help from any minister and without help from any presbyter. And then they went to Philadelphia after they had a church going, and asked for a minister, and asked for a presbytery. Committees and bureaucracies are neither very imaginative nor ventrism. Indeed, a faceless bureaucracy was the goal of the reorganization of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, Southern Presbyterian Church, in 1973, and as a consequence, it never had the power to rally the people.

The Priesthood at Risk

Nathan Hatch of Notre Dame University in a very interesting article has argued that the churches which have really grown in American life in recent years have been the people's churches, not the churches which have been tightly organized bureaucratically. The church as a priesthood of all believers is at risk today, at least in the Presbyterian church for at least four reasons. First, it is at risk in the priorities of church life. According to the tradition, the first priority in the human activity of the church are those actions by which the church lives, namely the hearing and the receiving of the Word of God. This is the activity in which the church originates and by which it maintains its existence. Many of the slogans which have become current in contemporary church life mislead the church, such as the church's mission, or the church lives by mission as fire lives by burning, or the church must be concerned not for itself but for the world.

These slogans, which mesh with the ideologies of our time, are only partially true. They assume there is a church to live by mission or a fire to live by burning. They also assume that preaching, teaching, and pastoral care are self-centered activities or that they are safe and secure so that we do not have to worry about them. These slogans assume that the church is here, that it exists and that one can take it for granted. Well, one could have taken it for granted in 1950 when many of those who have this particular attitude toward the church first came to consciousness. But what could be taken for granted in 1950 in American society cannot be taken for granted today. what is at risk is the church as a worshiping, believing community. The functions by which the church lives direct our attention not to the self or to society but to God.

John Calvin once declared that the salvation of the soul is not the cheap end of human existence. The cheap end of human existence is the glory of God, and for that reason, the Calvinists rejected many of the revivals because they thought they put too much emphasis upon saving one's soul. By inference we can say that the salvation of the world or even the survival of the world from a nuclear holocaust as horrible as it might be is not the cheap end of the church's existence. That shrewd agnostic, Sidney Hook, has some good Calvinist notions at times. when he declared that those who make survival the chief end of life are declaring that there is nothing they would not do in order to survive. As Calvin put it, and as the Westminster Shorter Catechism reaffirmed, the chief end of human life is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.

The church today must be asked if it is giving priority to those works by which it lives on the human level. There are many additional activities which strengthen the life of the church and indeed would strengthen any human organization, but the church must first ask not about management, not about strategies of human wisdom as important as they may be, but though about those activities by which the church, according to its faith, lives. The priority of the church as a priesthood of believers is endangered by the church's absorption in so many activities such as social witness which are derivative from the faith but are not the activities by which the church lives. The priesthood of all believers is also put at risk by the increasingly coercive role of the book of order.

In the late 1960s, voice were raised in advocacy of the strict construction of the book of order but loose construction of the creed of the church. I remember the shock I experienced when I first read in Prabhichar in Life a letter to the attitude which said the time has come when we must clearly say that the really authoritative book in the church is a book of church auto and the creed the confessions may be loosely interpreted. This must have been the first time in the history of Protestantism for any such idea to have been voiced as a serious opinion. In actual fact, American Presbyterianism existed for more than a century, one-third of its history without a book of church order. The book of church order, which began in a very simple form in Calvin's ordinances, the books of discipline of the Church of Scotland, the form of presbyterial government of the Westminster Assembly, and the old books of church order and American Presbyterianism were all small books, enunciating principles, more than prescriptions, and only revised after periods of three, four, five, or 10 years.

Today, the book of church order is more and more a manual of operations, rather than a church policy. Increasingly, the statements of the book of church order are prescriptions. Increasingly much in the book of church order replaces may. There are historical reasons, no doubt, there are historical reasons for the changed character of the book of church order. For example, one sees it in the replacement of clerks by executives in presbyterary senate and general assembly. In the early centuries, Presbyterianism conveyed its understanding of any continuing office in the church by entitling the official a clerk, that is the secretary. Since World War II, the image of the clerks have frequently been replaced by the corporate image of the executive.

The language of the executive, even the chief executive, crept into the vocabulary of the church, certainly without New Testament precedent, and surely representing the high point of secularization of the church itself. None of this is to suggest that the church can exist without officials, but they do not have to be called executives and they need to be kept very humble and realizing that the church is the people. Yet having been for 17 years a member of a presbytery with clerks and no full-time staff, and now for 28 years a member of presbytery is with executive types, I know of no convincing evidence that the larger presbyteries with executives get more done than the smaller presbyteries with clerks and with no full-time staff. Indeed, the evidence seems to point in the opposite direction.

The new form of the book of church order, the book of order, can be understood as a response, I think, to the increasingly voluntary character of the church in a secular pluralistic mobile mass media-dominated society. I never knew the church was voluntary until I was a graduate student in New Haven, Connecticut. Now for the first time I experienced people, some of whom went to church and some of whom did not belong to the church and it did not seem to matter. Up until that time I was under the conviction that all decent people and the pressures of society was such that decent people had to belong to the church. This is no longer true. The church now is a very voluntary organization. And therefore, I think the change in the book of church order is comparable to the theological fundamentalist reaction to the Enlightenment and the 19th century cultural developments.

In a sense, the fundamentalism of the book of order has replaced theological fundamentalism. There is no evidence that a fundamentalism of the book of order will be any more successful in dealing with the problems of the church in the world today than theological fundamentalism. One of the good experiences I've had being at the Center of Theological Inquiry is dealing with my friend Keith Egan, who is a Catholic, and we have a point we've noted several times that Presbyterian have acquired church law. That's a very interesting change. canon law for Presbyterians. The church must consider anew if the organizational structure of the church must not be modified from recent developments to enhance the priesthood of all believers. It must be modified to restore the right of the people to elect those who govern them and who serve them as their pastor.

A right which has been increasingly restricted by the actions of presbyteries and general assemblies. This right of the people, especially in Presbyterianism, was one and a long struggle beginning with Calvin in Geneva and reaching heights of intensity in the 17th and 18th century settlements. One of the advantages of not being past the church being a local congregation has given me a new appreciation of the right of the people to have a say about who baptizes their children and who buries their dead and who preaches to them. There needs to be a restoring of the freedom of the local congregation to call its pastors. There needs to be greater freedom for Christians in the church to have a choice of how their benevolent gifts are spent. One of the dates for the decline of the church in the southern church is about 1963 when we replaced bored treasurers with a central treasury and made it impossible for people to give their money the way they wanted to give it.

In the church, as in civil society, money is more likely to be responsibly used when it is used close to the surveillance of those who give it and who have earned it. Fourth, the church must ask what it means for the priesthood of believers that the leadership of the Presbyterian Church never has to face the people. Leaders and civil government, legislators, mayors, congressmen, presidents, all finally have to face the people and be voted upon. In contrast, Presbyterian leadership is increasingly elected by delegated committees and bodies whose own freedom is severely restricted. Any secular, worldly politician knows that the more a body is delegated, the more its actions can be easily controlled. In 1972, a handful of McGovern Democrats in Virginia got controlled Democratic Party.

They couldn't elect anybody because they represented very few people and they made Virginia safe for the Republicans for 10 years. In the period from say 1966 to 1972, a small handful of of ecclesiastical activists got control of the political machinery of the Southern Presbyterian Church, though they had very little influence in terms of people who worshiped in congregations on Sunday. There's an anomaly that the leadership of the church is never voted upon by the people. The simple fact is that the political activity of the Presbyterian Church and the problems which it faces more and more resemble the political activity and the problems of the Democratic Party. This is not necessarily good or bad, but it is a matter which needs to be subjected to theological scrutiny.

The Bureaucratization of the Church

The priesthood of believers has also been put at risk by the bureaucratization of the church. The bureaucratization of the church is very recent in the last hundred years, particularly in the years since the Second World War. 19th century. Much of the church's work beyond the local congregation was done through voluntary organizations such as Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the American Bible Society, the Sunday School Association, Christian Endeavor, and so forth. The massive increase in the bureaucracy is one of the problems that the church faces today. A bureaucracy is necessary, yet bureaucracies all have built-in tendencies to be self-perpetuating to think of themselves as the church and also to become remote from the church.

One of the most perceptive studies of the church took place by Jeffrey Hadden in 1969 in which he said, in the gathering storm of the church, Hadden of the Sociologist Western Reserve University of Virginia, he said there are three problems in the life of the church that are going to create a a great crisis fighting in the late 60s, published in 69. One was the crisis of faith. Do we really believe that Jesus Christ is the Christ, the Son of Living God? The second was confusion about what the purpose of the Church is. Is it an organization to change society or is it an organization to talk about salvation of the human soul? And thirdly, he said, a new class of Church bureaucrats. Up Up until that time, Hadden, according to his studies, said the bureaucracy was made up of pastors who moved back to the pastors who did the work of the bureaucracy of the temporary service.

Now, he says, the bureaucrats are becoming real people, isolated from the church, and as he suggests in that study, hostile to the local congregation. Peter Berger, in a very suggestive paper about the new class, talks about the bureaucratization of our society, the new class of people who handle inflammation, who are the communicators, the lawyers, et cetera, which has become the huge, huge class. This class, as Berger suggests, is a class that does not produce wealth, and therefore, the new class in the civil order is somewhat hostile to the people who do produce wealth. Now, something analogous to that is in danger of happening in the Presbyterian Church, where you have a new class, a tremendous bureaucracy that does not, in secular terms, produce wealth.

I want to put it in theological terms, does not build congregations, does not gather congregations, does not bring people into the membership of the church, does not raise budgets. Now, it can, this new class can survive in society generally because of the tremendous increase in productivity in American life, but in the church there has not been an increase of productivity, that is, the building of congregations, the bringing in of members, the raising of budgets, but rather a decrease. This is, it seems to me, a disastrous situation. time is up, let me say the final word on this particular theme it seems to me, is that we have to note that the church is a voluntary organization which lives by moral suasion. When I vote for a congressman in Virginia, congressman Blythe can do anything he wants and what he wants I have to abide by until he comes and has to face the voters again after two years.

Same thing's true with the in the government. In the meantime they can do what they please because they have a Marine Corps and more importantly they have an IRS, as all of us know about this time. In the church the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church can pass any resolution it pleases, but nothing happens except in minor matters in regard to mellitus unless the people in the local church want to respond. The church lives not by the IRS and not by the Marine Corps but moral suasion and the sooner we learn that the sooner there will be a renewal in the church. The conclusion of the matter is that the renewal of the church in our time must begin with the renewal of the church as the priesthood of believers and with the ministry as a calling not a living concentrating upon the task of a pastor. Thank you.