How the church makes clergy
… and why it should think about changing
I recently found myself attending two ordinations in one week, after not having been to one for quite a while. As a result, the language of the ordination service struck me afresh.
It goes without saying that the church has changed a great deal in the more than 40 years since the 1979 Prayer Book was drafted. A whole generation of clergy, myself included, was born after the “new” prayer book, and has grown up knowing it as our only Book of Common Prayer. And for the church that we now find ourselves serving, in our 20s and 30s, the language and theology to which we are being asked to commit ourselves upon ordination rings false, and feels problematic, on several fronts.
It is hardly surprising that the liturgical forms for ordination are deeply clericalist. Over and over, the priest* is asked to strive to be an example for the people, as though clergy became more inherently virtuous simply by virtue of ordination, and as though the comparatively “sinful” laypeople needed a “pure” model to look up to. In fact, as any conscientious parish priest can attest, we are still human; very far from perfect; and there are people in our pews who put us to shame in terms of the quality of their discipleship. A priest’s vocation is not as a general example, but as the follower of a specific calling, no more or less virtuous than any other, that happens to involve the public ministry of Word and Table. But you would never know it from these liturgies.
The consciousness of the ministry of all the baptized, which was just emerging in the decades leading up to 1979, receives lip service in the 1979 ordination services, but the whole clericalist structure that underlies them is left intact. And entirely apart from the language, the role of sacramental ministry and parish leadership is distinguished — privileged — simply by being given its own set of rites of recognition in the Prayer Book. It is all very well to say (as the preacher at one of the ordinations I attended did in fact say) that the priest is called to ministry primarily through baptism, and that baptism is the ordination of every believer; but until we have services that, in church, recognize, bless, and set apart doctors, teachers, car mechanics, artists, accountants, firefighters, farmers, and every other human calling to work that is worth doing, our liturgical theology of both baptism and vocation will remain defective.
The ordination liturgies also assume that the church in which the ordinand will be ministering is an unchanging institution, and that the first and most important thing he or she should vow is to conform to its doctrine and be obedient to its authority. As a generation that grew up being told in confirmation class that our questions were more important than our answers; that saw our own and other denominations deeply shaken by clergy misconduct, including at the level of the episcopate; and that witnessed the global Anglican communion almost tear itself apart over issues of gender and sexuality, we are hardly inclined to see those who are put in authority over us as implicitly worthy of obedience, or “the doctrine, discipline and worship of … this Church” as something easily definable and simple to ally oneself to. It would be easier to say these vows wholeheartedly, if the bishop in turn explicitly promised to support our ministry, even (perhaps especially) when it takes us in directions that the church has not gone before; and if we were asked, not to ascribe to a monolithic and unchanging doctrine (that is nevertheless nowhere defined within the context of the service …), but to love and continue to explore the as yet unrevealed mysteries of God.
Perhaps the thing that struck me most powerfully in these encounters with the ordination services was how little room they allowed for failure, repentance, and forgiveness. If there’s one thing that has become crystal clear to the Episcopal Church in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, it’s that clergy screw up. The 1979 Prayer Book is more than willing to acknowledge that people, in general, screw up; many is the baptismal family and premarital couple to whom I have pointed out that both the baptism and marriage services use when, not if, to describe our failures, and remind us by their language that after those inevitable failures we are expected to “recognize and acknowledge [our] fault,” “seek each other’s forgiveness and [God’s]” and “repent and return to the Lord”.
There is no such provision in the ordination service. It does not necessarily expect that perfection will happen, but it does assume that perfection is possible. Needless to say, this assumption is wrong. Every priest will sin and fall short in his or her ministry, and will need to repent and seek forgiveness. The ordination service asks the candidate to say, simply, “I will” in response to a terrifying list of vows, in contrast to the baptism service’s more realistic, “I will, with God’s help.” And the complete lack of any reference to sabbath and self-care in those vows (not to mention the requirement that the clergy vow to try to control their family’s lives as a Christian example, as well as their own!) only increases the implied expectation of total availability and selfless perfection — an expectation that is likely to give rise to burnout, and worse.
At one of the services I recently attended, I said to the new priest at the reception, “You know, I appreciate how you took our hidebound, institutional, authority-obsessed service, and threw the Canticle of the Turning into the middle of it like a grenade.” I suspect this is what our ordination liturgies need: less church, and more scripture; fewer old men’s voices, and more young women’s; and most of all, a recognition that the job of the clergy is not to maintain an institution, but to invite all people into God’s dance of death and resurrection, which may or may not involve hurling the mighty from their thrones — even when the mighty is us.
* And, mutatis mutandis, the deacon and bishop; but in this post, I will concentrate on the service of ordination to the priesthood as paradigmatic.
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