Pillars of Flame

Power, Priesthood, and Spiritual Maturity

Maggie Ross

• Publisher: Seabury Books
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781596270640
• eBook ISBN: 9781596271821
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Is the priesthood a power to be exercised, or a call to share in the broken Christ? Ross sets modern questions about ordained ministry in the Church within a much wider context, encouraging us to reflect anew on the relationship between administrative power and spiritual authority within the Church, and to redefine the priesthood.

She minces no words in her critique of the contemporary Church, and goes on to propose changes so sweeping and fundamental that we sense what a truly Christian Church would be.

I. PRIESTHOOD AND THE
CHRISTIAN

“There is a certain bleakness in finding hope where one expected certainty.”

URSULA LE GUIN, THE FARTHEST SHORE

“You are not thinking; you are merely being logical.”

NIELS BOHR TO ALBERT EINSTEN

“I think the whole of theology will come to be seen in a different light. ...”

EDWARD SCHILLEBEECKX, GOD IS NEW EACH MOMENT

1. Priesthood and Ministry:
Ordination Does Not
Bestow Priesthood

“You have great power inborn in you, and you used that power wrongly to work a spell over which you had no control, not knowing how that spell affects the balance of light and dark, life and death, good and evil. And you were moved to do this by pride and by hate. Is it any wonder the result was ruin?”

URSULA LE GUIN, A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA

“If I brung him down for any thing it ben becaws he thot you cud move the out side of things frontways and leave the in side to look after its self. Which I think its the in side has got to do the moving its got to move every thing and its got to move us as wel. If I say diffrent time after this itwl be fearbelly talking I know I aint brave.”

RUSSELL HOBAN, RIDDLEY WALKER

“Sayin’ a sheep has five legs don’t make it so.”

ATTRIBUTED TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN

God is related to the creation in kenotic (self-emptying), eucharistic, indwelling engagement, the love shown to us in the priestly humility of Christ. The hierarchical orders that exist in many Christian churches are true neither to the disclosure of Christ’s humility nor to New Testament Christianity. As we shall see, any hierarchy entails a dualistic class structure that invariably fosters immaturity.

Hierarchies define themselves by precisely the sort of dominance condemned in the New Testament. Thus, to call these orders “priesthood” is both anomalous and self-contradictory. Further, claims that Jesus established this system have been systematically disproved by biblical scholars.¹

Even before these critical tools were available to us, for many centuries Christians have felt that a manipulative power structure that also purports to represent the confluence of divine and human sacrificial love is blasphemous. Those in control quite naturally silenced the voices of these critics, and Christianity has become progressively more sterile because of its self-contradiction.

Some theologians appeal to tradition to justify perpetuating this contradiction, and their appeal, particularly to the subapostolic and patristic ages, is fatally flawed. It is flawed not only because New Testament evidence will not support the churches’ claims that their system of orders was established by Jesus, but, more important, it is flawed precisely because the tradition is dedicated to preserving its own inordinate control even at the price of its reason for existence, which is communicating the revelation of forgivenness, service, possibility, and freedom in the humility of Christ.

Indeed, this flaw is so fundamental as to call into question much of the theological tradition that is known as “Christian.” Such an assertion neither dismisses the tradition nor opts for anarchy, but rather points to the fact that organizational, that is, secular, functional power tends to make creatures into objects to perpetuate itself. Organizational power has a strong tendency to deteriorate into self-aggrandizing, or worldly, power and creates closed systems. That the churches create closed systems is one of the deepest wounds of Christian history, a wound we must enter if Christianity is to survive.

There is no salvation in a closed system. If institutional Christianity is to find salvation, the power systems that operate at every level need to have built-in, fail-safe devices, means to short-circuit power before it becomes self-perpetuating. Power systems need tripping mechanisms like those in pressure-sensitive transducers on household alarms. However, unlike most alarm systems, which are designed to prevent intrusion into a guarded space, these would maintain the integrity of the churches’ vulnerability and compassionate response that is Christ’s.

The question of priesthood and ministry is under discussion everywhere. It is a central issue in ecumenical dialogue, the debate about the ordination of women, the crisis brought about by shortage of clergy in the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England, and the extraordinary growth in clerical numbers in The Episcopal Church in the United States. In addition, nonordained people are increasing their ministerial roles in every church, especially where Christianity is persecuted. These and other movements within the churches seem to have led to wider and perhaps freer questioning about the nature of priesthood and ministry than has occurred since the first three centuries of the Christian era.

We cannot seek answers to these questions in the context of an unexamined tradition. Rather we need to decode that tradition’s inherent self-contradiction, the self-contradiction of controlling power that gave rise to the separation of the institutions from the humility of Christ in the first place. These questions cannot move toward illumination until we reclaim the practicality of the divine Humility. But first we must review the dilemma and the loss of vision.

A Brief Survey of the Present Confusion

The self-contradiction and incoherence of our theology of priesthood and ministry is as old as Christianity, because there are always those who wish to twist the humility of Christ into a religion of power. In every generation there are people who wish to take the Cross, turn it upside down, and sharpen one end into a sword.² This self-contradiction has disorienting and catastrophic results. It means that for centuries we have been giving secular answers to religious questions. When we fall back on these secular answers, a fissure develops in our ontology: we fall away from our being-in-God, for a religious question is engagement and a secular answer is mere technique.

We in the churches have reduced our search for religious answers to technology, to a series of controlling propositions that together make a closed system in which we become trapped. Our insistence on technique means that we perceive and try to manipulate religious questions, God, the creation, and ourselves as if we were isolated fragments, objects, instead of creatures engaged with one another in the kenotic Love of God. When we treat something as an object we remove its capacity for engagement; we encapsulate and kill it.

There is nothing in the fabric of creation and the interrelatedness of the creation that is inherently worldly, not our work, or our play, or our committed love-making, or anything else. It is we who create the secular when we make any part of the creation fall away from its engagement with the rest of what is moving in and out of existence by making it object, by isolating it as a fragment and exploiting it, by thus taking its life to support our delusions of power. The worldly character of a person or process results from the choice to fall away from being.

We become reductionistic when we confuse the internal tension of faith that moves within the continuum of Incarnation with the tension that desires to maintain by control the false synthesis that ostensibly integrates two contradictory models of power. These models are the zeus-god of objectifying, controlling power, who demands our life (pace, classicists, it is indeed a popular caricature), and I WILL BE of kenotic, eucharistic engagement, who enhances our life (see Appendix A).

When we attempt a false synthesis, we create static and artifical resolutions. Instead of regarding these resolutions as temporary stopping places where we can catch our breath before we seek a still wider perspective, we seize them, delighted with our own cleverness, and turn them outward to impose them as “answers” on our own, and worse, on others’ lives. Or, equally facile and equally destructive, we repeat the same insight over and over, without any engagement or self-critical realization, “all is question, there is no answer, and happily we run along.” We are lazy and self-reflective (as opposed to creatively self-critical), and our tidy resolutions feel comfortable.

Any seeking that is properly called Christian must be free and open and grounded in the self-emptying humility of Christ, which means that it must be willing to be in unknowing and seeming insecurity as it finds its equipoise of response in the love of God. By this standard, much of today’s power-oriented religious propaganda that calls itself “Christian” is mislabeled, if not frankly deceitful. Television evangelists give one version of this message, the Vatican another; an organization that might call itself “Christians for Nuclear Weapons” would be an absolute contradiction in terms.

By absolutizing our reductionistic resolutions and techniques, our religious questing becomes synthetic and we become trapped and isolated in our closed system. We fall ever farther away from being, seduced by the fragmenting, individualistic self-image we are intent on creating and projecting. Or, to use another image, our devotion to self-image removes us from the confluence with Love, who gives us being, and our life drains away through the ontological fissure. We widen the fissure in our being when we use selection instead of discernment to choose the people we hope will enable us to close it, to restore our engagement, to find religious answers.

When we use these worldly sensibilities and controlling techniques to search for religious leaders, we tend to select people who are expert in worldly (self-aggrandizing) political techniques and who will only aggravate our falling away from our engagement with God. We are puzzled and disillusioned when they cannot enable our religious maturity, refusing to see that we have fallen into our own trap. Because we deny the impossibility of our false synthesis of the controlling Zeus-God and I WILL BE, our search for religious enablers and religious answers becomes indistinguishable from the illusory problem-solving power-struggles of the politics of self-aggrandizement.

In the churches where people are flocking to ordained ministry in numbers far in excess of jobs available, the people responsible for ordination are asking two questions: “Should we ordain them?” and “Why are they offering themselves?” Can all these people truly be called to the organizational hierarchy, or are they haunted by something more fundamental for which the churches have no response, or perhaps once had but do no longer? The people offering themselves for ordination give a variety of answers as to why they feel called to be part of the hierarchy of their church. All their answers boil down to one: a call from God, which is a mystery.

Those who counsel and examine these people often have an uncomfortable and frustrating task. The idea of “interior call” is a relatively recent one. In earlier centuries, churches would have regarded such certainty of a call to ordination with deepest suspicion because it would have been a sign of desire for worldly, that is, self-aggrandizing power. The church depicted in Acts and the church of the Egyptian desert described in the saying of the desert Fathers (Apopthegmata) are two examples of churches in which “interior call” was not a consideration for ordination. Certainly a balance needs to be struck between interior call and the churches’ desire to ordain people chosen by the community, but the scales seem to have tipped too far over toward an often poorly discerned interior urge.

While it is true that many of these people do in fact seem to have a call from God—each of us, without exception, has a vocation—it is also evident that for many of them, ordained ministry is the last place they should try to live out this call. How can the churches respond to them? (For a discussion of this problem, see Part II, Chapters 5 and 6.)

The selection committees seem hard put to describe what they are looking for when they screen candidates. On a committee of ten there may be eleven (or more) opinions as to the differing natures of priesthood and ministry. Candidates accepted by one screening group are sometimes turned down by another.

Sometimes the committees make these decisions with painstaking self-searching and inner distress at the delicacy required for a discernment that will affect the whole of a person’s life and hopes. On the other hand, sometimes their decisions are tinged with political agendas—power, favoritism, vendetta—that have little to do with discernment. As one bishop has lamented, “It is distressing to realize that my ordinands end up regarding me as an adversary.” As a clergy member of a Commission on Ministry observed, “It seems to me that all the people who seem to have potential for the spiritual nurture of others get turned down, and all the politicians get approved.”

The selection problem, from a parish point of view, is a nightmare. Let us look at a hypothetical clergy selection process based on several actual parish experiences (and two diocesan searches for bishops) in The Episcopal Church in the United States. (Some form of selection torture seems ubiquitous, present in every church.) This hypothetical example is not intended to show how the process ought to work but how it seems to work in fact.

A parish is asked to make a profile of itself that describes its group personality, and the members are asked to agree on what kind of pastor they seek. The parish makes this assessment statistically, and a politically selected committee writes the final version of the profile. Invariably there are some people in the parish who are dissatisfied with the profile and feel that their particular needs are being ignored.

This profile is sent to a central computer, which in return sends a list of candidates to the parish, which, combined with other candidates suggested by the bishop and those nominated through word-of-mouth, can present the selection committee with over three hundred names to choose from. Note that this committee is called a selection committee and not a discerning community. The selection committee then begins an agonizing weeding-out process. It can hardly meet each of the candidates, much less make any kind of deep discernment even if its members could agree on what ministry or priesthood is.

Since the descriptions on the computer printout or letters of nomination are based on material written by the candidates themselves, the process from the parish point of view resembles choosing a new friend from the columns that advertise the needs of the lonely at the back of the New York Review of Books. From the candidates’ point of view, it becomes an exercise in self-marketing. Right from the start, the process loses those most suitable for the spiritual nurturing of others because they are the people who are least likely to be able or inclined to sell themselves.

In addition, any committee process is by nature more political than contemplative, and politics virtually eliminates the possibility that the Holy Spirit will have any say at all. The Holy Spirit, after all, is self-effacing. While some will argue that that “group process is the playground of the Holy Spirit when entered into openly and freely, without predetermining its outcome,” such groups are rare. Members become members by behind-the-scenes maneuvering because they have a political stake in what is going on. The process is thus not entered “openly and freely,” and to assume that in even a few groups all members enter the proceedings “without predetermining its outcome” is naive. It could be argued that I am committing the same error of expectation outlined at the end of the Abecedary, to which I must respond that expectation about individual development is one thing and expectation about group process quite something else. History has given us too many examples of the workings of group process for us to remain naive about the human lust for power. And for group process to work, the members of the group must have a motivation other than greed and self-promotion.

Power-struggles within the committee are often responsible for weeding out names; these struggles only obscure what little information is at hand. But somehow the committee gets through the list and makes recommendations. Sometimes the candidates are invited to preach and be viewed; in any event, the wardens make their selection. They call a new pastor and work out a contract.

A former clergy deployment officer adds:

Parishes lie about their needs and their spiritual condition. So do clergy.

Parishes often call someone they intend to control like some neophyte priest or the present curate.

Parishes often call someone they don’t really want because they can hire him/her cheap.

The rectory, its size and condition, is often the factor that determines whether the cleric is issued the call. I know more than one church that has always called bachelors because it will not buy a bigger rectory or consider a housing allowance.

Vestries call desperate priests needing jobs to desperate parishes that fear no priest will have them.

Parishes often call clergy from several states away when many capable people are available locally. In many cases this seems to be related to the degree of unresolved problems in the parish. The worse the known problems, the farther the distance of the called and supposedly ignorant cleric.

A Roman Catholic concurs:

It seems that even though the example you draw out is for churches who select, the same fundamental problem of criteria and implementation exists for churches who appoint. And appointment carries the additional stigma of having the “good old boys’’ perpetuate themselves and their ideas by who they appoint where. The Roman Catholic church is scandalous on this count. Not only do priests get appointed to “good parishes’’ by who they know and how political they are, but grave injustices, not to mention crimes, are hidden and perpetuated by reassigning problem priests to different parishes without ever dealing with the problems. Both the archdioceses of New Orleans and Minneapolis/St. Paul have been or are being sued because for years they reappointed priests to parish after parish, priests who should have been prosecuted for molesting young boys.

Sometimes the selection process results in a reasonably harmonious relationship between parish and pastor; most of the congregation is happy with the new minister. Sometimes the selection committee or the appointing hierarchy realize they have made a disastrous mistake. Once in a while a senior warden has the courage to say so, refuses to sign or recalls the contract, and calls for another finalist. More often, the parish feels it is stuck and hopes for better luck next time. There is often a sense of futility: surely among all those names was hidden the right pastor for the parish! But, for the most part, tenures are short, and with luck the parish will have another opportunity in five years’ time.

Why are tenures short? Is a short tenure as desirable as some church administrators would suggest? One answer frequently given to these questions is that a pastor comes with a particular task to do, and at the end of five years that task is usually accomplished, changed, or failed. Another explanation is that the energy and motivation of the pastor shifts about this time; creativity is tempered, and either the relationship settles down for the long ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu
• Author’s Note
• Abecedary: An Essential Primer of Theological Quanta
• Part I: Priesthood and the Christian
• Part II: Models of Power and Spiritual Maturity
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Epigraph