Ordination Notes from Readings: An ongoing exploration.

Why ordination? Ordination certifies that the church considers this person worthy to represent her missions, goals and identity. Things done by an ordained person are expected to be in agreement and officially affirmed to be within the mission and vision of the church. The concept of ministry and the space created by all humanity for mission is broadened. When an ordained person is present, a space is created for that person that is not created for the ordinarily dressed person. What happens inside that space is critical to the mission of the church. Therefore, a certain amount of professionalism, care for the history and traditions is required and ordained persons are to be held to account by authority and obedience. The visible marks of clergy are shown respect and the authority and risk of abusing that space must be assured and made transparent and accountable.

Ephesians 4 talks about the spiritual gift of “pastors.” To get rid of pastors, or any flavor of anti-clericalism, along with the refusal to acknowledge the role of ordained persons would deny this gift to the church. However, the fact remains that there are two types of Christian (ordained and laity) and they are separated by education, ordination, function and culture. The pastor is a gift, the prophet is a gift, the teacher is a gift, the healer, the translator, the poet, the artisan, the craftsman, the baker, farmer and all the gifts are the Spirit are given in love for one another and the worship of the holiness of God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. We are one Body, we share one bread, and one cup.

Here is an ordination speech from the Bishop of Kent: “In the name of our Lord we bid you remember the greatness of the trust that is now to be committed to your charge. Remember always with thanksgiving that the treasure now to be entrusted to you is Christ’s own flock, bought by the shedding of his blood on the cross. It is to him that you will render account for your stewardship of his people. You cannot bear the weight of this calling in your own strength, but only by the grace and power of God. Pray therefore that your heart may daily be enlarged and your understanding of the Scriptures enlightened. Pray earnestly for the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
   
From the ordination vows of a Priest we read the following promises made and the expectations of behaviors that are to be made manifest. The first promise is to” respect and be guided by leadership.” To be “guided” implies that a priest assumes a role in a hierarchy of an institution and “respects” the limitations and expectation implied. This is another example of the via media at work and in living within the tensions. Blind obedience to authority is not the expectation and angry reformation is probably not expected either. Discernment and husbandry are given room to breathe. It would be a shame to level this off with reductionist and corporate practice manuals and rigid codified politic.
      
A priest promises to be “diligent in the Word” and to “persevere in prayer.” This is more than study and scholarship. William Stringfellow calls it a “keen biblical perceiving, more than academic knowledge, more than sentimentalist kitch, but a baptised imagination and an confessional posture akin to Holy Ghost discernment.”
   
A vow to be a “minister for words and sacraments used for reconciliation” is the hinge pin that holds the via media together between the purely functional, administrative, pragmatic and politic and the devotional practices of prayer, compassion, humility and confession. The actions of Eucharistic festivals, the blessing of objects, the absolution, and the benedictions/blessings are what holds the interior and exterior lives of a parish community together.
   
The poet, William Stafford, talks about treating the world as if it really existed. Wittgenstien says “that the world is, is the mystical.” Rob Bell says that how you “feel about creation is how you feel about the Creator.” Along with the doctrine of showing up comes the promise to “pattern a good life.” This is the hardest concept to unpack except to say that it is the opposite of pessimism and nihilism. Stanley Hawerwas says: “America is a culture of death because Americans cannot conceive of how life is possible in the face of death.” A priest shows how to and lives in opposition to the culture of death. E. F. Schumacher, echoing G. K. Chesterton, says, “It is no longer possible to believe that any political or economic reform, or scientific advance, or technological progress could solve the life-and-death problems of industrial society. They lie too deep, in the heart and soul of everyone of us. It is there that the main work of reform has to be done - secretly, unobtrusively.” This is the job of baptised persons and the ordained. The “secret and unobtrusive work” of the reconciliation of our hearts and souls to the fact that the temple veil has been rent, that which is sacred has been loosed upon the world and that which was formerly hidden has been revealed.

Francis Hall, an early Episcopal writer, echoing Church of England’s 19th Century Moberly claims, “All share in the priestliness of the body, all the faithful functions in what the priest is appointed to do as well as he (she). He (She) acts ministerially and the laity, participatively, but the action is corporate and organic. There is but one priesthood, and the participation in it of ministers and laymen is equally real, is equally grounding in membership of Christ’s Body, and is unalterably conditioned by interior organic relations which preclude external substitution or intervention by ministers between the laity and Christ. Any difference between the priest and the layperson --and the difference is real--- is not one of kind but of function and office. The function is shared and owned by all. The one presides and the other participates in the organic act of the body.”

Priests and bishops must preside. This includes pastoral leadership, preaching, discernment in the face of popular piety, teaching the god-talk language, and always being prepared to explain life and lifestyle in theological language, and by blessing of material life as a visible sign of the invisible claims that the Gospel makes on our lives.

In Christian Scharen’s, Faith As a Way of Life: A Vision for Pastoral Leadership, Miroslav Volf says, “The central challenge for pastoral ministry today concerns the most important mark of good ministry: is the ability effectively to mediate faith as an integral way of life to people, communities and culture.” Therefore the pastoral vocation seeks to “develop, sustain, and academically legitimize Christian faith (not spirituality!) as a way of life.” This mediating faith is a divine transformation. This transformation is the answer to the most pressing question: “How do we live a moral life within the culture of death?” Faith says that the power of death has been overcome.  We and all material creation are no longer subject to and under the dominion of death and its powers and principalities.
   
Pastors must be transformed by faith as to the orientation of their lives. As others have said, ordained ministry starts with confession of the divine transformation of the ontology of their life. Capacity to practice theological discernment is key. Covering therapeutic practice with a veneer of faith, wallpapering “God-talk” over posturing, entrepreneurial zeal and political ambition inside the rubrics of faith and “god-talk” is not the role of ordained ministry.

A priest must master different registers of diction. What I mean by this is captured by the inescapable rule that it really doesn’t matter what you say, what matters is what your audience hears. Teachers, poets, pastors, priests, and humanistic endeavors must have a care for language, rhetoric, word choice (diction) so that people hear what is good and necessary for them to grasp. The most audacious thing that Christian proclaim is that there is a claim being made on their lives! Priests, poets and teachers must be able to speak in the way that the hearer will understand the nature and reach of that claim. We must know how to use language, and as Christians this means a baptised language and a baptized imagination as a means of creating various and appropriate emotional shades. The difference between rhetoric as captured emotions and seductive speech as given to us by Aristotle, and baptised language and Christological “god-talk” is predicated on the sense that the other person, the hearer is holy, blessed and not to be manipulated.

The movements of the soul, the broken heart, the wounded body, the suffering servant, and the saint are, as wisely told us by the Desert Abbas and Ammas, only encountered, only enticed, only en-fleshed and only find their agency in paradox. A poet, priest and teacher must be able to articulate, measure, and theologically construct meaning from paradox and the tension created between the horns of a dilemma. Theological reflection begins with a paradox of deciding between two irreconcilable goods.

Here is the paradox for poets, priests and teachers who are called by their baptism to accept the claims made on their lives. The rhetorical skills required for the job are no longer derived from their own efforts. All human rhetorical skill given is placed at the service of the Holy Spirit within community. Here is where the tension rises. The trained professional that can deliver flawless, carefully calculated and perfectly executed poems, lectures and homilies must accept the impossible position: we should speak God’s word, but we cannot make this happen. No amount of rhetorical and exegetical mastery will speak to the congregation. As such teachers, poets and priest are bound to fail -- unless some miracle occurs, unless God speaks.

Stanley Hawerwas says,

“Yet in the book of James (3:1-5) we are told: ‘not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits.’

If James is right, and I certainly think he is, then how can I suggest to you that if you are to serve the church well in the ministry you must become a teacher and, in particular, a teacher of a language called Christian? I do so because I think the characterization of the challenges facing those going into the ministry is the result of the loss of the ability of Christians to speak the language of our faith. The accommodated character of the church is at least partly due to the failure of the clergy to help those they serve know how to speak Christian. To learn to be a Christian, to learn the discipline of the faith, is not just similar to learning another language. It is learning another language.” (Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Speaking Christian: A Commencement Address for Eastern Mennonite Seminary’, The Mennonite Quarterly Review 84 (2010), 441–44.)

Pastors are not allowed to be prophets and scolds without the vocational gift of showing up whenever, wherever and to whomever calls. The pastor must love the flock, even the unlovable that must be turned over to God who can love them. A priest must be a pastor first and a prophet only when the trust, love and relationships established in the marrying, burying, blessing and touching have been well grooved and worn smooth as steps. Bill Coffin says that “if you are a faithful pastor, your flock will give you great freedom to pursue your passions, be it peace and justice work, or collecting butterflies.”

    Michael Jinkens, in “Letter to New Pastors,” says, “Pastors preach not from their own heart but from the heart of Jesus. Be sure it comes from the word of God.” Now here is the crucial point. The preaching is still the most important part of church for many people. Can the person called to lead and preach discern the word of God? Does the education and training required of ordained priests prepare the persons for that?

The priest is one that must practice, live and instruct all persons, not just the baptised, how the theology of divine (even radical) hospitality works. John Chrysostom placed particular emphasis on this aspect: “This is hospitality, this is truly to do it for God’s sake. But if you give orders with pride, though you bid him take the first place, it is not hospitality, it is not done for God’s sake. The stranger requires much attendance, much encouragement, and with all this it is difficult for him not to feel abashed; for so delicate is his position, that whilst he receives the favor, he is ashamed. That shame we ought to remove by the most attentive service, and to show by words and actions, that we do not think we are conferring a favor, but receiving one, that we are obliging less than we are obliged.”

He also taught: “For if you really wish to worship the image of God, you would do good to humans, and so worship the true image of God in them … If therefore you wish truly to honor the image of God, we declare to you what is true; that you should do good to and pay honor and reverence to everyone, who is made in the image of God. You should minister food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, clothing to the naked, hospitality to the stranger, and necessary things to the prisoner. That is what will be regarded as truly bestowed upon God.”

For the leaders of the people of God, the primary challenge of hospitality is not only to abide by the rules of social and economic equality and solidarity but also to acknowledge God as the recipient of their moral actions. The bread shared with the stranger is companionship with God extended to the world as a reflection of God’s justice and righteousness. A prophetic deacon and a nag may not be able to deliver this rule.

The creative energy of the priest is in the binding and loosing, or the gathering and scattering, of community actions and the ordering of desires so that when a priest must council and teach about rightly ordered loves, the lover of  holiness as the enjoyment of God and the revelation that only in worship is holiness recovered and re-ordered. As Aldous Huxley rightly claims, “The spiritual journey does not consist of arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not. It consists in the dissipation of one’s own ignorance concerning oneself and life, and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one’s self.”

The ministry of the deacon, constrained by rubrics of “service” may be traditional, but is no longer considered Scriptural unless the reader has been seduced by the “plain reading of Scripture” cultus, and most importantly is no longer reasonable. The sober-minded will certainly see the special ministry of deacon as a repudiation of their baptismal vows because all baptised persons are called to the service of others in Christ. To say that there is special service is to set up the caste of “super-servant” and that is untenable.

The office of transitional deacon, historically for students waiting to be old enough to ordain, is not Scriptural, not traditional, and not reasonable. If it remains an official position, it is a convenience and a practice of institutional maintenance. In that it is an issue of contest within the permanent deaconate, it is a principality or power and must be redeemed from the culture of death. Because there is precedent for the recommendation of the abolishment of the office of deacon in 1974, all permanent deacons must feel that they are beset on all sides. This office must be jettisoned. Baptism is the only sacramental requirement for ordination. Discernment of spiritual gifts is sufficient for determining which office, and the assessment of the qualities of leadership, while in service to the church, is of course mandatory and not to be excluded. The echo of the “inferior office” of the 1928 prayer book ordination service is heard in the current “special ministry” as long as the transitional office is used.

The ministry of the deacon is to testify to the facts on the ground of the claims the Gospel makes on our lives, report (baptised journalism) on the movements of reconciliation with the parts of the church that are not subject to the power of death with the unchurched, unloved and unwanted. The ministry of the deacon is profoundly discerned as the gift of prophecy, evangelism, and, where there is allowable overlap with Bishop and Priest, is in the gift of teaching. The contest here is against the structural barrier placed against deacons in that they are not allowed the pulpit to preach. A deacon represents the whole of Christendom. A priest represents that whole and a localized, bounded territory, a community that has a name, a history, a story and a reputation is a specific time and place. When the priest shows up, the entire congregation shows up with him or her. What an awesome responsibility.
   
Deacons should not allow themselves to be treated/considered as supercharged baptised or substitute and semi-professional priests. They are not a symbol of what we all should be if we took our baptismal vows “seriously.” A Deacon’s agency is in the practice of mercy, the message bearer of justice and injustice and the call to subvert the management regime in churches that have sold out to powers and principalities. The so-called “deacon’s mass” and other pinch-hitter ideas of semi-pro priests should be avoided by deacons like the plague. A deacon can be made bishop without becoming priest, or the entire baptismal vow is rendered meaningless and the artificial clericalism of minister and laity remains under the dominion of the power of death.
   
Timothy Sedgwick defines deacons to exist to gather the congregational community into its servant ministry and challenge the Church to always look beyond herself. They are leaders who have a visible ministry to the dispossessed, are willing to undertake the role of the prophet, and will strengthen the servant ministry. Unpacking the meaning of “servant ministry” is difficult. This is made more difficult by the ordination vow of “special ministry” discussed below.
   
The prophetic and anti-establishment player or non-insider status of a deacon is implied in the fact that they do not have to promise and vow to “respect the leadership,” as a priest does. This gives the deacon a role that the priest does not have; to speak truth to ecclesiastical power.  A deacon must model the authentication of worship as witness. Deacons bear the sacred word as herald. They interpret the works of others, stir the emotions and model as John the Baptist, they announce the kingdom of God’s past, present and future. They speak the word of the world to those playing church as a business management case study. Deacons interpret the actions of the world and are in themselves calls to action.

All baptised are called to prayer, scripture and giving spiritual direction (theological  reflection/discernment). These are the invisible angles of the hospitable and humanistic work of the baptised. For the ordained, the visible lines of the triangle made by these angles are preaching, teaching and administration. These visible lines are what people see and expect from a priest. These are not the expectation of a deacon. A deacon is not a parish administrator, a deacon is not allowed to preach. The only visible line of ministry allowed a deacon within the single-pastor parish is that of teaching and that is reduced to the vague and unremarkable sobriquet of “formation.”

Peterson, Eugene H. Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity. Grand Rapids, Mich: William B. Eerdmans, 1993. Print.

Stevens, R P. The Other Six Days: Vocation, Work, and Ministry in Biblical Perspective. Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans, 1999. Print.

Plater, Ormonde. Many Servants: An Introduction to Deacons. Cambridge, Mass: Cowley Publications, 1991. Print.

Sedgwick, Timothy F. The Making of Ministry. Cambridge, Mass: Cowley, 1993. Print.

Barnett, James M. The Diaconate-a Full and Equal Order: A Comprehensive and Critical Study of the Origin, Development, and Decline of the Diaconate in the Context of the Church's Total Ministry and the Renewal of the Diaconate Today with Reflections for the Twenty-First Century. Valley Forge, Pa: Trinity Press International, 1995. Print.

Ditewig, William T, Richard R. Gaillardetz, and Owen F. Cummings. Theology of the Diaconate: The State of the Question : the National Association of Diaconate Directors Keynote Addresses, 2004. New York: Paulist Press, 2005. Print.

Keating, James. The Deacon Reader. New York: Paulist Press, 2006. Print.

Cummings, Owen F. Deacons and the Church. New York: Paulist Press, 2004. Print.

Cox, R D. Priesthood in a New Millennium: Toward an Understanding of Anglican Presbyterate in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Church Pub, 2004. Print.

Jinkins, Michael. Letters to New Pastors. Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2006. Print.

Seamands, Stephen A. Ministry in the Image of God: The Trinitarian Shape of Christian Service. Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 2005. Print.

Wolfgang Vondey.  People of Bread: Rediscovering Ecclesiology New York: Paulist Press, 2008. Print.


*************Rough Thoughts in No Particular Order*****************

The essential difference of deacon and priest can be analogically located as the difference in orientations, functions and passions as an art critic is different from an art museum or art gallery curator. An honest critic (deacon) praises or damns a work of art as a prophet and skillfully shows how the artifact measures within the overall culture and society. On the other hand, an art curator (priest) from his own aesthetic and personal choices of inclusion and exclusion, the decisions to include and exclude, to bind and loose, articulates a possible world, and from these choice imagines and creates and exhibit of a new way to see. It is out of his own anxiety and dissatisfaction the movements of soul that the curator situates the exhibition within continuous tradition.
In like manner, a priest explicitly curates worship out of his concrete actions and choices, anxieties and frustrations. Worship is an event of enacted holiness, and holiness is the enjoyment of God in an highly aestheticized environment that has been built for this special purpose. A deacon is more properly an investigative journalist, a critical herald and a message bearer. To consign a deacon to the actions of service, more properly the responsibility of the baptised communicant is to set them up as an “idealized” christian and they will fail and we have scapegoated and projected onto him our refusal to live out our baptismal promises to care for one another and all persons as Christ loved the church. A deacon is a critic and should praise what is praiseworthy and decry what is abominable.
A parish is like a museum in that the buildings and cultus objects are  an articulation of the reconcilling work of grace. And this articulation is directed by the priest. Imagination (noetic) is, at least on the macro level, the fun parts. Creativity, inspiration, liturgics, performances, prayers, colors, smells, music and sound and all of the works of Beauty in the world are the visible Grace and are the hallmarks of good life, well lived. For Christians, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, but in the revelation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the physical world. Priests must make aesthetic choices and the history and beauty attendant to religious institutions is vast, deep and robust. Just as a curator establishes a a location for art within a continuity (pneumatic), so too a priest locates and enacts a worship in a tradition, within a communion of parishes, within a communion of saints and within a community of place and time.
But in the church, what and where exactly is the work of art located? Is it the building? The stained glass? the altar hangings and table furnishings? Not exactly. The works of art for the church is the humanity of the communicants. The art is in the flesh and blood of the people. A priest curates the lives of actual enfleshed, dare I say incarnated Art, of the working of the Holy Ghost. The works of art are people. The critique of art by a deacon is the critique of the people’s thoughts, works and deeds. A priest curates a collection of people and each person is a precious work of God’s making, God’s art.
Define a theology of ministry when there isn’t one.
Baptismal vows bind, tie, obligate, and demand our commitment, loyalty and, to carve out a biblical term, “slavery” to one another. So then where is a doctrine of ordination that is not a negation of the bounds of baptismal promise? The praxis of ministry is well articulated with plenty of thorough scholarship in biblical archeology, the history of certain words in the Scriptures, tons and tons of words of self-justification and rationalization of positions of authority and commercial politic, and a rich cultural and literate tradition of the public and private roles of a priest.
Almost all Anglican and Episcopal thought on the theology of the ministry seem to go out of their way to to emphasize that to be ordained is not a category of “superspiritual,”  “super pious,” or “super believer.” Baptised, confessing and real-live human beings are suitable, licensed and asked to perform many tasks associated with ordained ministry. Apart from a few privileged tasks such as the blessing of objects and people for mission, consecrating Eucharistic elements, and the absolution of sin, most other actions of ministry can be performed, albeit under extraordinary circumstance, by lay persons.
All provisions and discussion of the role and purpose of ordained ministry emphasize some basic proficiencies. They are that an ordained person must speak well, read well, conduct public worship, and posses the social entrepreneurship to engage in relationship building with both individuals, social organizations, governments and economic institutions. It is assumed by most that an ordained person be articulate, confidential, circumspect and principled in intimate situations that seem to come with the position. All agree that ordination is a position of trust.

This is where the majority of Anglican “ordination” books spend their time. Some would argue that because an ordained person is a visible representative of a larger institution,  a priest is primarily involved with the functional and managerial duties and job descriptions of institutional survival. Partially this is a reaction to and over against what was perceived as the overly Roman notion of the ordained priest as a representative of Christ on earth. This argument is not settled and the definition of ordained ministry is still contested.

    A priest as functionary is expected by most persons and certainly if these  basic functions of the job are not organized and held to account, the ordained person as employee is jeopardized.
    Most of the books on ordained ministry also agree on one point. That there really isn't a robust theology of ministry. If there is a theology of ministry that is not bounded and contained in the weird concept of “servant leadership,” then it is held in tension between three concepts. 1.)Noetic practices and technologies and practice that evolve out of the concept that humans have a robust inner life. This is traditionally called the soul, alternatively called mind, personality, or consciousness. This is often written about, endlessly argued and is heavily invested in psychotheraputic, spiritual practices, and seems to drift and blur the lines between gnosticism, mysticism, transcendentalism, psychology, mythopoetics, integral spiritualities and new age popular beliefs.
    Whilst Anglicans and other liturgical children of the reformation must continually be mindful of stopping just a wee bit short of the Roman sacredotal nature of the ordained person (male) as Christ’s viceroy and representative on earth, all ordained persons are expected to start from a confession of Theophanic actions. That is a commitments to actions that reveal God’s work. 2.)Theophany is the revelation of God in this particular time and place. Ordained persons must believe that God is revealed, shown, experienced, apprehended, and is actively engaged in loving his creation within the physical, in fleshed, natural world. Ordained persons believe and confess, proclaim and testify that material things matter to God and that the work of the incarnation is ongoing, working and completable. God became human so that humans could become God.
    A theology of ordained ministry is assumed and predicated on the motions and actions of the 3.) Pneuma, the breath of God and to be filled by the Holy Ghost. It is the workings of the Holy Ghost through ministries. Much has been written and the debating points seem endlessly nuanced and arcane. The bottom line is that the ordained person’s sense of call to this vocation is intimately and reliably intertangled, interpenetrated and inter-dependent on the work of the Holy Ghost in community of believers. Without community ordained ministry is un-remarkable.
Madeline L’Engle says that “Those who believe they believe in God but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.” I believe that we cannot define an ordained person’s ministry in terms of sociology, psychology, anthropology, or philosophy. The theology of ordained ministry begins with confession and works by discernment of concrete choice and direct action and continues with the ordained person believing in the continued action of the incarnation in the world. From the doctrine of the Incarnation we have ordained ministry. From the practice of discernment we have ordained ministry. From the doctrine of the Atonement we have ordained ministry. In a simplistic way we need our Father in Heaven and our Mother the church. And oh! what a wild bunch of children this mother has birthed! If the church was a perfect mother we would all join and mess it up. The ministry of the priest is to believe in the children even when the children are creeps. This believing is like when Hafiz says that “No one cannot not look for God.” A theology of ministry must be curated and husbanded to grow organically and organizationally in the belief and in the hope and honesty of this desire in all people. Ordained persons must produce and orchestrate emotionally satisfying, intellectually stimulating, complacency challenging, spaces, events, and performances that celebrate, ennoble, re-enchant, beautify, cherish and encourage this desire.

Talk about the contested space of the diaconate.

    Is the basic category of Christian "service or holiness"? This never-ending tension is the contested field of what is the specific ministry of the diaconate. Priests, Bishops and some Deacons believe service, Many deacons feel excluded from the actions of communal holiness, and some flip sides and say that priests are servants and deacons are ministers of holiness. At any rate there is a structural barrier. The sermon. The sermon is essential to make connections, interpreting the signs, proclaiming, heralding, challenging, revealing God in a liturgy. Liturgy is formalized and the participants are mostly passive and attention of all participants is paid to the style and beauty and rote. The deacon usually does not have access to the pulpit. If the service is rote and the deacon cannot preach, then the prophetic role of the deacon is silenced within the church. Therefore the deacon must leave the church/liturgy to speak truth to power. However, the deacon does not have the social and political capital of a priest in the outside.
    The deacon is still undefined and the spaces occupied by deacons are still disputed land. There is no consensus and most clerical folk are partisans and have a strong willingness to continue to fight.  A deacon is whatever the Bishop in charge of the territory is willing to allow. As such, they do not experience leadership within the institution. They can cheer, they can cajole, they can point, wave, drag and push but they rarely lead.
    Deacons are flesh workers in that they are fundamentally concerned with the action and inaction of people in relationships with other people. Deacons are not makers of the church as event. Deacons are curators that showcase and pick and choose where attention needs to be refocused or focused anew.
    However, if we are all called into the service of each other by our baptismal vows, the so-called servant roles assigned to deacons maybe superfluous. If deacon equals service to poor, charity and compassion then it is a renunciation of the baptismal vows and an insult to the priesthood of all believers. If it is evangelistic/prophetic then Deacons find skin and voice.

Role of the Deacon

    Deacons point out the shortcomings of the institutional mission and point to those whose desires, passions and loves that the institutional community are ignoring and are not being cherished within the community created by the concrete actions of the priest.
    Deacons had better not be treated/considered as supercharged baptised or substitute and semi-professional priests. They are not a symbol of what we all should be if we took our baptismal vows "seriously.” A Deacon's agency is in the practice of mercy, the message bearer of justice and injustice and the call to subvert the management regime in churches that have sold out to powers and principalities.
    A deacon must model the authentication of worship as witness. Deacons bear the sacred word as herald. They interpret the works of others, stir the emotions and model as John the Baptist, they announce the kingdom of God's past, present and future. They speak the word of the world to those playing church as a business management case study. Deacons interpret the actions of the world and are in themselves calls to action.
    Timothy Sedgwick defines Deacons to exist to gather the congregational community into its servant ministry and challenge the Church to always look beyond herself. They are leaders who have a visible ministry to the dispossessed, are willing to undertake the role of the prophet, and will strengthen the servant ministry. Unpacking the meaning of “servant ministry” is difficult. This is made more difficult by the ordination vow of “special ministry” discussed below.
Encoded in the ordination vows of a Deacon are the following semantic clues to the ministry of a deacon. The vagueness of the language is reason for the continued debate, but like all things undefined can be construed as freeing rather than circumscribing. The first oddity is that deacons are called to a “Special Ministry.” This is a problem statement and a call for self-discernment at the same time. This phrase should give all ordained persons a small hiccup in the conversations. Less vague, but undefined is the promise to “serve.” There are many models and metaphors for “serving.” Likewise the interpretations, translations, philology of the New Testament writer and speakers who use this word and its analogue are vague and disputed as well.
    The promise to “study scripture” is no less problematic because of the structural barrier posed by the lack of access to the pulpit. Formation classes and catechisms are not the same as the sermon within a formalized liturgies.
    The promise to model Christ's redemptive acts is usually construed to mean that a deacon works with the poor, the uncharitable, the weak and the marginalized as this is what Jesus did in his earthly ministry. This is the actual historical basis for the role of deacon since the Reformation. However, if an expansive definition of redemption, in light of the Incarnation is applied to this vow,  then the redemptive acts of Christ include the radical rebirthing of ALL creation. This would lead smoothly to the vows of “interpret the church,” “assist priests,” and “other duties.” A deacon in this conception would bear the message of incarnation, speak for the church to the unchurched, be in relationship with other ordained persons, and be gracious to the needs of others and the workaday work of the institutional church.
    Of the three pillars of noetic, theophanic and pneumatic, the deacon would not be generally concerned with the noetics of the other. The deacon is principally concerned with the theophanic. The actions and agency, the call and the message of God incarnate and revealed in the world. The pneumatics of Holy Ghost working in Deacons is personal discernment, teaching and prophetic. The building of community relationships and social organizations is not the work of a deacon.
    The prophetic and anti-establishment player or non-insider status of a deacon is implied in the fact that they do not have to promise and vow to “respect the leadership,” as a priest does. This gives the deacon a role that the priest does not have; to speak truth to ecclessiasticall power.
    A deacon brings prophetic disruption when a deacon says that there are people who do not feel invited to the garden, go gather them in. Most importantly, a Deacon has to keep reminding everyone that there is a physical and material world that is being remade into a new creation going on in every molecule of the universe, that a well-meaning focus on “spirituality” misses the mark entirely and that the spiritual nee cultus practice of worship does NOT connect you to "spiritual reality." There is the real, fleshy, messy, material world and it is incarnated and made holy by our relationship with it in Christ.

Role of the Priest

    Idealized and bounded by the three pillars of noetic, theophanic and pneumatic, the priest would be expected by the culture to be principally concerned with the noetics.  A priest is supposed to be a technologist of spiritual things. This is a distraction. This technology of a priest is to construct events that in the hearing, participating, touching, seeing, smelly physicality of situations, scenes, ordinaries, places, events, and functions so that the church as event is an experiential, existential of the holiness of God. Therefore, the role of a priest is primarily Theophany. A priest, out for his or her own force of will, creativity, and willingness to act, to move, to enact and to perform causes an God-revealing event. Because these events happen in that particular time and most importantly within the attention, authority and gaze of a priest in a local and particular place it is at once nostalgic and apocalyptic and a visible act of the worship of God. As it is an action of worship and an external sign of grace these events become an act of  penetration in the community, and through the apprehension and perception of the creative and aesthetic choices made by the priest, the holiness of God and the all desire of the people to enjoy God is given appropriate space to happen.
To counter the “new age” and gnostic confusion of the noetic, the principle work of the noetically focused priest is the proclaim as Rob Bell says, “You can’t be connected with God until you’re at peace with who you are. If you’re still upset that God gave you this body or this life or this family or these circumstances, you will never be able to connect with God in a healthy, thriving, sustainable sort of way. You’ll be at odds with your maker. And if you can’t come to terms with who you are and the life you’ve been given, you’ll never be able to accept others and how they were made and the lives they’ve been given. And until you’re at peace with God and those around you, you will continue to struggle with your role on the planet, your part to play in the ongoing creation of the universe. You will continue to struggle and resist and fail to connect.”
The creative energy is in the binding and loosing of community actions and the ordering of desires so that when a priest must council and teach about rightly ordered loves, the lover of  holiness as the enjoyment of God and the revelation that only in worship is holiness recovered and re-ordered. As Aldous Huxley rightly claims, “The spiritual journey does not consist of arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not. It consists in the dissipation of one’s own ignorance concerning oneself and life, and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one’s self.”
    The direct concrete choices and the event precipitated by the presence of a priest is not principally concerned with the theophanic, at least in the Anglican traditions. To say that a priest “reveals” God just by showing up is a bit too much for Reformation-minded persons. However, in tune with the Via Media, or the Third Way, it is the choices, expressions, words, actions and agency of the vocation as public confession and as an enfleshed call of God incarnate that is absolutely revealed. Therefore, whilst the ordained priest may not exactly be Christ’s representative and viceroy on earth as the Romanist followers feel, and the ordained person is not the everyday believer as the ultra reformation protestants opine, but is somewhere located in the tension of each.  
    A deacon cannot signify and make something into a sign. They can interpret the existing signs, draw maps,  and lead the search party, but they cannot make something into a sign. A priest of course can do everything that a deacon can do, but can do this signmaking, and making special by the act of blessing and not blessing as in Matthew 16:19 is called binding and loosing that deacons cannot. Both mediate meaning, but a priest can construct a new meaning for an sign out of nothing more than his/her attention and desire so to do. A deacon cannot. This is an awesome and terrible responsibility. A priest must be conservative here.
    The Pneumatism of Holy Ghost working in priests is not personal discernment as in a deacon’s aegis, but is corporate, communal and parish discernment. The roles of teacher, apologist and perhaps prophet are structurally given to the priest by the rules around who can produce homilies in the pulpit. The building of community relationships and social organizations is not the work of a deacon it is the primary role of the priest. Ministerial priesthood is to mediate, reconcile, instruct and create communities. The priestly economy is the working of the parish, the workings of the communities and social groups in and around the parish and the inter-relatedness of parish with diocese.
    The social entrepreneurial role of priest as communitarian implies a professional status as a communicator, advocate, organizer and leader. Leadership conducted by prieste is fundamentally determined by concrete choices not abstract pieties. A priest must discern and decide that  “I (we) will do this and we will not do this.”  Concrete choices and direct actions are the creative and leadership qualities of a priest. This is very closely related to the actions of a priest blessing material objects. This behavior is exclusive to the priest and bishop. A decision of  “I will bless and not bless” is something a deacon may or may not have the ability to perform.
By the direct actions and choices of the priest he or she attempts to create events of worship wherever the priest is present and two or three are gathered in Christ’s name; because church is an event, not just a building.  
    Here is an ordination speech from the Bishop of Kent: “In the name of our Lord we bid you remember the greatness of the trust that is now to be committed to your charge.  Remember always with thanksgiving that the treasure now to be entrusted to you is Christ’s own flock, bought by the shedding of his blood on the cross.  It is to him that you will render account for your stewardship of his people. You cannot bear the weight of this calling in your own strength, but only by the grace and power of God.  Pray therefore that your heart may daily be enlarged and your understanding of the Scriptures enlightened. Pray earnestly for the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
    From the ordination vows of a Priest we read the following promises made and the expectations of behaviors that are to be made manifest. The first promise is to” respect and be guided by leadership.” To be “guided” implies that a priest assumes a role in a hierarchy of an institution and “respects” the limitations and expectation implied. This is another example of the via media at work and in living within the tensions. Blind obedience to authority is not the expectation and angry reformation is probably not expected as well. Discernment and husbandry are given room to breathe. It would be a shame to level this off with reductionist and corporate practice manuals and rigid codified politic.
    A priest promises to be “diligent in the Word.” and to “persevere in prayer.” This is more than study and scholarship. William Stringfellow calls it a keen biblical perceiving, more than academic knowledge, more than sentimentalist kitch, but a baptised imagination and an confessional posture akin to Holy Ghost discernment.
    A vow to be a “minister for words and sacraments used for reconciliation” is the hinge pin that holds to via media together between the purely functional, administrative, pragmatic and politic and the noetic practices of prayer, compassion, humility and confession. The actions of Eucharistic festivals, the blessing of objects, the absolution, and the ?? are what holds the interior and exterior lives of a parish community together.
    A priest promises to be a “faithful pastor” and to “offer your labor” to the work of the church. This is also known as the “theology of showing up.” At a perfunctory level, a priest must show up when needed.
    William Stafford talks about treating the world as if it really existed. Wittgenstien says that “that the world is, is the mystical.” Rob Bell says that how you “treat creation is how you treat the Creator.” Along with the doctrine of showing up comes the promise to “pattern a good life.” This is the hardest concept to unpack except to say that it is the opposite of pessismism and nihlism. Stanley Hawerwas says: “America is a culture of death because Americans cannot conceive of how life is possible in the face of death.” A priest shows and lives in opposition to the culture of death. E. F. Schumacher, echoing G. K. Chesterton, says, "It is no longer possible to believe that any political or economic reform, or scientific advance, or technological progress could solve the life-and-death problems of industrial society. They lie too deep, in the heart and soul of everyone of us. It is there that the main work of reform has to be done - secretly, unobtrusively." This is the job of baptised persons and the ordained clericus. The “secret and unobtrusive work of the reconciliation of our hearts and souls to the fact that the temple veil has been rent, that which is sacred has been loosed upon the world and that which was formerly hidden has been revealed.
    The early Anglican writers on the qualities of priests and most of the early monastic and ecclesial heroes as well as the Desert Christian fathers and mothers would say that the good life is patterned on a list similar to the following. A priest is to be reconciled to: This is the list to be reconciled to: 1) Prayer and praise, 2) Confidence and abandonment to God, 3) Humility, 4) Obedience, 5) Poverty, 6) Chastity, 7) Austerity, 8) Simplicity of Life, 9) A Balanced Life, 10) Silence and Solitude, 11) Work, 12) Hospitality and Service, 13) Stability, 14) Simplicity, and 15) Joy.
    Lest this list seem pain filled and argumentative, recall that a priest is to be a constant and present reminder that life is a gift; the universe is built of irreplaceable small, personal attachments; our lives are small but great dramas of good and evil, of reason and unreason; our reason and knowledge are real already at the level of common sense and hardly require the withering “tests” of the modern philosophers.   Priests must  defend “catholicism,” as in the fundamental goodness of everything—from good beer, juicy steaks, and cigars, to children, wives, countries, love affairs, chivalry, one’s neighborhood, fairytales, adolescent melodramas, and the Cross of Christ. A priest, like G. K Chesterton and C. S. Lewis must be held accountable for how good a job he or she has done in the defense of the basic goodness of life—its reality as a divine gift, a present to which the only possible sane response was a continuous “Thank you.” saw most clearly the nature of nature, as it were, the order of creation and proclaimed with a resonance no man of good will may forget: to be is good, Being is Good.
    A priest is a visible and enfleshed carrier of the message that Christian materialism (sacramentality, incarnational reality) and the fact that Christ holds all things (material) together and if it feels to the rationalist as if it teeters on the brink of paganism and superstition- because it sees the world as charged with the glory and grandeur of God. As an ordained person, I am not against a bit of superstition. It gives people the idea that this world is not everything.

From ABC Williams
In reality and practice servant leadership and leading disciples is about being what ABC Rowan Williams calls, “the person who asks forgiveness is a person who has renounced the privilege of being right or safe; he has acknowledged that he is hungry for healing, for the bread of acceptance and restoration to relationship. But equally the person who forgives has renounced the safety of being locked into the position of the offended victim; he has decided to take the risk of creating afresh a relationship known to be dangerous, known to be capable of causing hurt.  Both the giver and the receiver of forgiveness have moved out of the safety zone; they have begun to ask how to receive their humanity as a gift.” These are the movements and action of discipleship.

In addition Archbishop Williams makes a statement about community making; “Forgiveness is one of the most radical ways in which we are able to nourish one another’s humanity.  When offence is given and hurt is done, the customary human response is withdrawal, the reinforcing of the walls of the private self, with all that this implies about asserting one’s own humanity as a possession rather than receiving it as gift.  This is Jesus people conflict resolution. There may need many practical structures and methodologies antecedent to this act, the the teleos of conflict resolution must be this action.


The unforgiven and the unforgiving cannot see the other as someone who is part of God’s work of bestowing humanity on them.  To forgive and to be forgiven is to allow yourself to be humanised by those whom you may least want to receive as signs of God’s gift; but this process is intrinsically connected with the prayer for daily bread.  To deny the possibilities of forgiveness would be to say that there are those I have no need of because they have offended me or because they have refused to extend a hand to me.


To forgive is clearly the mark of a humanity touched by God – free from anxiety about identity and safety, free to reach out into what is other, as God does in Jesus Christ.  But it may be that willingness to be forgiven is no less the mark of a humanity touched by God.  It is a matter of being prepared to acknowledge that I cannot grow or flourish without restored relationship, even when this means admitting the ways I have tried to avoid it.  When I am forgiven by the one I have injured, I both accept that I have damaged a relationship, and accept that change is possible.  And if the logic of the Lord’s Prayer is correct, that acceptance arises from and is strengthened by our own freedom to bring about the change that forgiveness entails.
Forgiveness is the exchange of the bread of life and the bread of truth; it is the way in which those who have damaged each other’s humanity and denied its dignity are brought back into a relation where each feeds the other and nurtures their dignity.  It is a gross distortion of forgiveness that sees it as a sort of claim to power over the other – being a patron or a benefactor towards someone less secure.  We should rather think of those extraordinary words in the prophecy of Hosea (11.8-90) about the mercy of God: ‘How can I give you up, O Ephraim? For I am God and not a mortal’.  To forgive is to share in the helplessness of God, who cannot turn from God’s own nature: not to forgive would be for God a wound in the divine life itself.  Not power but the powerlessness of the God whose nature is love is what is shown in the act of forgiving.  The believer rooted in Christ shares that powerlessness, and the deeper the roots go the less possible it is not to forgive.  And to be forgiven is another kind of powerlessness – recognising that I cannot live without the word of mercy, that I cannot complete the task of being myself without the healing of what I have wounded.  Neither the forgiver nor the forgiven acquires the power that simply cuts off the past and leaves us alone to face the future: both have discovered that their past, with all its shadows and injuries, is now what makes it imperative to be reconciled so that they may live more fully from and with each other …
But to speak in these terms of bread and forgiveness and the future presses us towards thinking more about the act in which Christians most clearly set forth these realities as the governing marks of Christian existence: the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist.  We celebrate this Supper until Christ comes, invoking the Spirit of the coming age to transform the matter of this world into the sheer gift of Christ to us and so invoking the promise of a whole world renewed, perceived and received as gift.  This is, supremely, tomorrow’s bread.
But it is so, of course, not as an object fallen from heaven, but precisely as the bread that is actively shared by Christ’s friends; and it is eaten both as an anticipation of the communion of the world to come and as a memorial of the betrayal and death of Jesus.  That is to say, it is also a sacrament of forgiveness; it is the risen Jesus returning to his unfaithful disciples to create afresh in them this communion of the new world.  The bread that comes down from heaven is bread that is being handled, broken and distributed by a certain kind of community, the community where people recognise their need of absolution and reconciliation with each other.  The community that eats this bread and drinks this cup is one where human beings are learning to accept their vulnerability and need as well as their vocation to feed one another.
So we can connect the prayer for daily bread directly to what goes before it as well as after it in the Lord’s Prayer.  We ask for the Kingdom to come and for God’s purpose to be realised as it is in the liturgy of heaven, in the heavenly Temple, where our basic calling to love and praise is fulfilled.  And in the light of that, we pray for today’s and tomorrow’s bread, for the signs among us of the future of justice and reconciliation, above all as this is shown in mutual forgiveness.
The Lord’s Supper is bread for the world – not simply in virtue of the sacramental bread that is literally shared and consumed, but because it is the sign of a humanity set free for mutual gift and service.  The Church’s mission in God’s world is inseparably bound up with the reality of the common life around Christ’s table, the life of what a great Anglican scholar called homo eucharisticus, the new ‘species’ of humanity that is created and sustained by the Eucharistic gathering and its food and drink.  Here is proclaimed the possibility of reconciled life and the imperative of living so as to nourish the humanity of others.  There is no transforming Eucharistic life if it is not fleshed out in justice and generosity, no proper veneration for the sacramental Body and Blood that is not correspondingly fleshed out in veneration for the neighbour.
If, then, we are called to feed the world – recalling Jesus’ brisk instruction to his disciples to give the multitudes something to eat (Mark 6.37) – the challenge is to become a community that nourishes humanity, a humanity on the one hand open and undefended, on the other creatively engaged with making the neighbour more human.  ‘Give us our daily bread’ must also be a prayer that we may be transformed into homo eucharisticus, that we may become a nourishing Body.  Our internal church debates might look a little different if in each case we asked how this or that issue relates to two fundamental things – our recognition that we need one another for our own nourishment and our readiness to offer all we have and are for the feeding, material and spiritual, of a hungry world’.