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In the current ministerial vocabulary, administration is a dirty word. When ministers get together after hours at a convention, the complaints that are not about money and bishops are nearly all about committees, women’s societies, the telephone, the mimeograph, denominational programs, correspondence, and various related matters all generally classed as "administration."

This commonsense impression received significant reinforcement from the study made by Samuel Blizzard, the full report of which is still unpublished. Roughly speaking, when Blizzard’s five thousand ministers were asked what aspects of their duties were most and least rewarding, they declared preaching and pastoral care to be most rewarding and administrative and executive functions to be least rewarding. But when asked about their actual time schedules, they reported spending more time on the latter than on the former.

So convinced am I of this general ministerial dislike of administration that I believe I know exactly how this discussion could achieve, for me, a peak of popularity. I could begin with tears over the mimeograph and the telephone, make resounding remarks about the minister’s need for plenty of time to study, portray the number of dying persons deprived of pastoral service by committee meetings, and declare warmly that the Word and sacraments should not be encroached on by carbon copies, budgets, and inept church school teachers. I could give a clarion call to the minister to be the minister, as the church is to be the church; and cap the climax by allocating all financial matters to a business administrator, all telephones and letters to a host of efficient secretaries, all committee meetings to something known as a "responsible laity," and all denominational program materials to limbo.

Can you not picture the utopia this would conjure in manifold ministerial breasts, including your own? At last we could get back to real morning devotions to start the day right, not the hasty scriptural snack to which we now seem confined. A productive but useful morning in the study would then follow. Think how rich our sermons would become. And we should, at last, have time to keep up with biography, with fiction, with history, as well as with all the branches of theology. No longer could the names of either Barth or Hemingway make us cringe. We should finally be able to quit pretending that we know who Heidegger is, why Toynbee is to be regarded with suspicion, and what an affluent society really means. When our imagined afternoon is considered, what Christian bliss indeed to make those hospital calls upon patients awaiting eagerly our attentive ear and reassuring word. Later in the afternoon we may rescue a marriage or two, save an adolescent from a criminal career, cure a morphine addict, and a few other similar but daily successes. And when evening comes, then above all we may finally not neglect our home but may play parchesi and backgammon with our adoring family gathered around us. Perhaps one evening telephone call, from some inept committee chairman, could be tolerated. After all, he could simply be told what to do and to take the responsibility for it. But no more. At bedtime what bliss to look back and thank God that one has, at last, had a day worthy of a minister’s vocation: plenty of prayer, plenty of study, plenty of service, plenty of family, and no conflicting demands from any person or group. With such a day behind one, he could give up not only tranquillizers but also his last vestige of relevance to the needs of today’s world.

If we should go back over this utopia with a realistic eye, the previous conclusions must at least be qualified. Our devotions go barren after ten minutes because we are awaiting a call from the hospital or the forms to make out our income tax. Our study is great for an hour; but then, right in the middle of Toynbee, we have to plunge into the consideration of new hymnals. The calls and counseling in the afternoon find one person bitter, another dependent, another recalcitrant; with few if any notches cut into the pastoral gun by tea time. And as to the evening, which child would drop dead first if father had time to play anything, let alone parchesi?

The tone of these remarks so far may appear to be realistic almost to the point of cynicism and exaggerated almost to the point of caricature; and I freely admit, on points like this, a certain initial predilection for excess. Although I shall not continue in such an extreme strain, it is simply my experience that, where some meaningful analysis of administration is concerned, nothing succeeds like excess — at least in getting attention.

Let me put in a quite different way one tact that has already been stated in another way but perhaps so that it sailed by before the reader could grasp it. That fact is that what ministers say they like to do is precisely what they do alone and by themselves without having to consult anyone but God, and that what they dislike doing is consulting and winning and relating to other people in order to get something done. They like preaching and pastoral care. They need not consult a congregational vote concerning the subject for the next sermon, nor have a committee diagnose a particular parishioner’s spiritual needs before they make a call. If they succeed, it is they (and of course God) who did it. If they fail, well, sometimes they fail, sometimes they are not appreciated, and sometimes the people were not ready. But succeed or fail, they have not been compelled to consult. The Lone Ranger rides off into the evening haze.

They do not like administering and executing. Whatever the specific task, the one thing that cannot be done with it is to move simply and plainly from one’s conviction to getting the thing done. A committee has to be called or consulted, and have its shins barked and its theology redecorated. A moribund society has to be revived, since even the Lord is manifestly’ not powerful enough to kill it. Even a letter cannot be answered without con-suiting the encyclopedia, the church secretary, the chairman of the board, or the Heidelberg Catechism. A thousand consultations shall fall at thy administrative right hand, and ten thousand executive encounters at thy left. And they shall make thee tetched.

I simply see no escape from the conclusion that, at least in our ministerial dreams if not in our practice, our patron saint is a combination of Narcissus and Hotspur. We want to do it alone and we do not want to be distracted by other people’s opinion. Perhaps the sign on the ideal ministerial door, if it were honest, would read, "No waiting; painless extractions; privacy assured." To be sure, this is a rather odd motto for the ministry of a church that professes to serve the world, and to do so through a Living Word carried and conveyed by a fellowship and in which priesthood is somehow conceived to be a universal function and not an aristocratic prerogative.

If I thought the distortion we now confront were only a small one, I should not be obliged to bring in the dangerous big guns of satire. But the twisting seems massive. Tinkering will not do. Something fundamental is wrong. And while I do not propose to set it all aright, I do want to take as clear a look at it as possible. For I believe that a hatred and distaste for everything lumped together as administration can be as severe an enemy of ministry as can the absence of the gospel message.

Administration and Poor Administration

In the argument that I shall make from here on, defending administering by interpreting it as no less important than preaching, I shall not, however, attempt to defend everything going under the name of administration. For some administration is poor not because it is administration but because it is poor. And it, for the most part, is what gives rise to the general image that ministers have when administration is mentioned. We may symbolize this by the cartoon image of the minister with rolled-up sleeves cranking the mimeograph machine.

In normal situations, as a matter of fact, this is not a proper image of administration but of the failure of good administration. For it suggests that the minister has accepted, or been beaten into, a hired-man position around the church. If anything involves work, "we pay him, don’t we?" But the fact is that masochism of some type, even the ecclesiastical, is needed to perpetuate such practices. So far as routine duties are concerned, no minister may properly conceive of himself as either a hired hand or a fall guy. Why is he cranking that machine? One reason might be that he cannot tolerate a sense of obligation to anyone; and if he got a good volunteer to handle the machine, he would have to be grateful; and since grateful feelings embarrass him, he cranks the machine, finally, to prevent the embarrassment of gratitude. Another reason might be that he can not bear to request paid secretarial help; for this would involve a need for more money; and thus he would lose his reputation for being such a "spiritual" person. It is also thoroughly possible that none of these Freudian revelations of inverted pride is nearly so important as his not being smart enough to ask the right people in the right way at the right time for the right things in the right tone of authority. But, whatever the reasons, he is not merely doing himself a disservice and building up a greater head of steam against something he thinks of as administration. He is also selling out the ministry of Word and sacraments. He shows that, whatever the reason, he has failed to interpret his function to his people, has not elicited their support and their service to enable him to perform the function; and in this instance has failed to get the people doing the mimeographing who ought to be doing it. This is not administration but poor administration.

We must, then, reject the mimeographing image of the ministry. But we must do so for the right reason. The reason is certainly not that the minister is too good to be caught mimeographing. Suppose that the time is Saturday evening, and that Mrs. Jones, who was to have mimeographed the Sunday bulletin as usual on Saturday afternoon, got a pain about noon and was taken to the hospital. Under these circumstances the pastor might very well be behind the machine for this occasion. No necessary function in the life of the church is foreign to him or beneath him, under special circumstances. But that is very different from making mimeographing normative.

Servanthood, which is so focal in our conception of ministry, always involves a proper relationship between two kinds of elements. On the one hand, since it seeks to serve where service is needed, nothing that serves needs is in principle beneath its notice. But on the other hand, as the notion of "waiter at table" that lies behind the servanthood idea is analyzed, it is clear that some kind of covenant about types of service offered and expected under normal conditions is essential. If there is no covenant, then service is forced into slavery. And if there is no spirit of commitment to meeting needs but only acceptance of specific tasks, then only a job is being performed and there is no servanthood. The minister is not too good to mimeograph. But his covenant should normatively be to things other than mimeographing.

Undoubtedly some poor administration comes from plain inefficiency, fancy laziness, and plain or fancy lack of self-discipline that fails to get some things, like correspondence, done when they ought to be done. But for much of it the motives seem far more complex and hidden.

For instance, let us take a quick look at Pastors A, B, C, and D, each of whom has just reported to a friend, with a mixture of pride and petulance, that he was not home a single night last week. Each complains about committees, conferences, and meetings. But when we take a good subsurface look at Pastor A, we find that he simply dropped in on three of the meetings — "They expect it of their pastor," he says. And on each occasion the chairman of each meeting, at the beginning, middle, and end, has expressed profuse thanks to the pastor for his presence and his wisdom, without which apparently dire events would have occurred. It takes no great psychological penetration to recognize that in Pastor A’s case his petulance about meetings is a bit feigned provided the correct doses of adulation have been doled out.

Pastor B looks at his meetings a bit differently. He fears that one committee, left to itself, might vote against God; another against the prayer book; and the third against the Republican party. Of course, if asked, he would deny that he regards himself as the indispensable man. But the fact is that the load he carries rather obsessively and narcissistically on his shoulders is the one thing that prevents him from admitting his secret self-judgment: that he is a lightweight.

The secret and unacknowledged fear of Pastor C, we find upon analysis, is that the committees will get along beautifully in his absence; and then where will he be? Pastor D, we find, attends the meetings, and then complains privately about them, because if they were not around to distract him, he would be compelled to face an evening with his family, or to make needed calls on parishioners, or to read a book. These latter possibilities all being, under the surface, too dire to contemplate, it is the meetings that receive his attention. Indeed, what would any of these ministers do with their aggressive impulses if there were no committees to blame them on.

There is, I believe, a little bit of each one of these hypothetical pastors in each of us. Some of our own poor administration comes not from ordinary inefficiency but from more subtle motivations about which we have not come clean. Can you, if the situation really calls for it, leave the telephone temporarily unanswered? Do you, in chairing a meeting, find yourself pouring oil instead of helping to clarify conflicts because you yourself feel threatened by the very fact of the conflicts? Do you use your car inefficiently not because you are incapable of plotting out an efficient round of trips but because it has become your real "castle," the one place where you can get away from immediate requests without feeling guilty? Do you complain privately about your secretary — who performs miracles already with the bad syntax of your dictation, but who cannot quite make you sound like Winston Churchill — because, if you took trouble with your syntax, you would be like an ordinary man and not a great spiritual leader? Do you build up inner resentment quietly when asked to do something unreasonable by someone from denominational headquarters, instead of taking the risk of being honest and open and saying no? There is a little bit of yes to each of these, and similar, questions in us all.

All of us are involved to some degree, then, in partially poor administration. But the astonishing fact is that our general conception of administration is determined by what is poor, not by what is good. When we considered preaching, we saw, in contrast, that our image comes from preaching performing its best and proper function, not from its distortions. Now, with administration, we find that pathology provides the norm. That is why the distortion is massive, and why our analysis both of poor or distorted administration and of positive and proper administration is so important. We turn now to the positive image of administering.

Administering as Commitment Through Group

Our proper conception of administration, like our image of preaching, has its modern starting point in the Reformation. It stems from the two closely related doctrines of the universal priesthood of believers and the universality of Christian vocation. Thus, from this perspective, administration was not invented solely in the twentieth century, and it was not a device of the devil. The meaning behind it is, in our Protestant tradition, just as important an interpretation of the meaning of ministry as is the preaching image.

Put in cartoon form, the image is this: a pastor standing slightly behind two other Christians, with a hand on the shoulder of each person.

The first fact that strikes us in this image is that there is a group, and that the group is made explicit. Whatever the persons may be assumed to be looking at, they are all looking at the same thing, in the same direction. It is not simply that they have a common goal. More basically, their actual perceptions share commonality. Further, there are three persons, thus clearly a group. Thus, any false interpretation that might arise if there were but two persons—master and servant, day and night, or even sexual connotations —are set aside by the presence of three. Since three is not a rounding-off number, as Carl Jung has reminded us, three is the proper symbolic number for this group; for they and their task are by no means rounded off. It is a group that is incomplete and with rough edges, just as it should be.

Second, it goes almost without saying that the members of the group are all shown on the same level. We saw that this same point was implicit in the preaching image. Here it is explicit, and there can be no mistake.

Third, the image acknowledges functional differences among the group members but no distinction as to basic task. There is no sentimental groupiness about everyone being as competent about everything as everyone else just because all are on the same level. The minister is shown with his hand on the shoulders of the others. His function is to provide a necessary and welcome guidance. But one may equally turn this statement about and say that the minister acknowledges he cannot move on alone. The need of minister for people, and of people for minister, is equal. And the basic task can be understood only in the light of what they can do together, even though functions are different.

Perhaps someone might want to make something out of the minister’s being a bit behind the laymen. In my cartoon the reason for this is that otherwise he would have to be a contortionist to get his hands on their shoulders, or would have to embrace them, neither of which alternatives gives quite the proper impression. Perhaps there is symbolic significance in the minister’s being just a bit behind. The people are the frontier contacts with the world. At least collectively, they know far more of the details of the world with its sin and sorrow than he individually can know. Perhaps it is proper for him to be taught by them about the world they all, as a group, seek to serve and to save.

When we look at the combined elements of this image, I contend that we are viewing the essence of ministry as administering in exactly the sense that the image of open-Bible — pulpit — preacher gave us the image of preaching.

In tracing the roots of this image of administering, it is clear that the biblical conception of servanthood would come first. Yet it is not serving that makes this image unique; for all proper images of the ministry also demonstrate forms of serving. The unique aspect of the present image comes from the Reformation juncture of universal priesthood and Christian vocation.

The universal priesthood of believers was partly a constructive and partly a polemical doctrine. It did not mean, as has sometimes been hastily and wrongly assumed, that every Christian is his own all-sufficient priest. It did mean two things: that a specially designated hierarchy as a channel of access to God was rejected; and that, under some conditions, any Christian might properly serve as priest to any other. Priesthood in general implies mediation or linkage. The Reformers were too wise to deny that linkage might be needed, even by ordained ministers. But they denied possession of a linkage function by a priestly class. Thus the whole conception of linkage, or human mediation, or of priesthood was changed from a status notion to a functional one. The paradox involved in this redefinition was very effectively prefigured in Paul’s statements about burden bearing. Christians are to bear one another’s burdens: but as he becomes able, every Christian is to bear his own burden.

Perhaps the thrust of the universal priesthood doctrine may appear more clearly if we think of some partial parallels. For instance, except for the unfamiliarity of the term, it would not be inappropriate today to call the best relationships in small groups of workers "the foremanship of all workers." We might even conceive of the "universal vice-presidency of all junior executives." Bernard M. Loomer once spoke of the "deanship of all instructors." Such terms connote something quite different from the "dictatorship of the proletariat," the "kingship of all lords," or the aristocracy of everybody who is not "in trade." They do not deny the importance of a focusing or guiding or leading function, and of its incarnation in foremen, vice-presidents, or deans. But just as the foreman’s function can be performed only through and in cooperation with the workers, so the function of the workers can be performed only as they acknowledge and responsibly live up to the "foreman" dimensions of their jobs.

The related Reformation doctrine was Christian vocation, which also had a constructive and a polemical dimension. Polemically it was denied that only priests are called by God to what they are doing. Instead, every Christian is called to his total functions in life: what he does in the church, what he does at home, and above all what he does in his work. True, the modern use of the term "vocation" as a synonym for working occupation is a serious distortion. But it was certainly the most radical aspect of the Reformation vocation doctrine to link a Christian’s calling explicitly with the way he earned his living. His vocation was a significant, and often the major, aspect of his ministry.

Every Christian. asserted the vocation doctrine, is called an active ministry. From church and Bible, through Word and sacraments, he receives the grace that makes him a believer. But the life of a believer is ministry. The inevitable response to a true "hearing" some kind of action — first in worship, to be sure, but then just as surely in service of God through serving the needs of the world. The Christian may of course go out from church and testify to others in the world, verbally, of the riches of his faith. He may perform special kinds of service, philanthropic, foot-washing, or their equivalent. But the radical declaration of the Reformation doctrine, while not denying either foot-washing or verbal testimony, was that a man’s principal ministry, in response to his vocation, was in the course of his common life. If he is husband and father, let him minister there through the quality of his common service to his family. If he is an artisan, let him glorify God and serve mankind by the excellence of his work and its products. To serve God he does not have to dream up some special daily good deed. Let him do well what he normally does in the common life, and this will be the principal indication of his hearing God’s particular call to him, and of carrying out his particular ministry as a result.

With universal priesthood and Christian vocation both in mind, let us backtrack to the administering image and reexamine it. A minister and two other Christians, with the minister’s hands on the shoulders of the others, all facing in the same direction. In the image universal priesthood is in the foreground. All are committed to the same basic task; but there are differences of function among them; and each needs the others if the common task is to be performed. There can be no lone-wolfishness or going-it-alone. Ministry involves commonality of basic task and mutuality of appreciation of different functions in performing that task. In terms of functions performed, the other Christian may be said to be as truly ministering to the minister as he may be said to be ministering to them. All three, jointly, seek to minister in Christ’s name to the world that stands beyond them.

But the Christian vocation notion, while not in the forefront of this image, is not absent from it either. How does each person express his response to God’s call? What the image does show is that each person expresses it according to his gifts or abilities or assignments, that is, functionally. The image denies that any one means of functional expression is inherently better than any other. Do what you are capable of doing — provided that it is seen as movement toward performance of the common task — and you are fulfilling your vocation.

Since the cartoon image is not a filmstrip, it does not go on to show the three Christians about their specific duties in the world. But that is implied. They do not simply stay in church. They do not remain as a literal proximate group twenty-four hours a day. Each goes out into the world to exercise his vocation, partly on special service, to be sure, but mainly through his participation in the common life, which is also ministry, if he so understands it.

When we look at the image from the point of view of the ordained minister, which is unapologetically our focus in this book, it becomes clear why this is an image of administering. For what the minister wants to get done cannot possibly be done by him alone. It must be done through and with — above all, in consultation with — other Christians. Precisely who should do what is not, so to speak, fixed in advance of the consultation. If the situation were always such that the minister allocated responsibilities to the others, then one assumes that he could go happily back to his lone-wolf duties except for the occasional periods of referral. But the actual situation is not like that. The result of the consultation may be to give him new responsibilities, or to give him a new sense of responsibility about guiding the others in the exercise of their functions. The results of true consultation are never wholly predictable. Thus real consultation is an enemy of that kind of mental economy that wants to know, now and forever, precisely what pigeonholes are for what pigeons. The administering image declares such a compulsion to be incompatible with true ministry.

There is one additional way in which all this may be put from the perspective of the ordained minister. The image tells us that the unique thing about the minister’s vocation is his responsibility for guiding the Christian vocations of others. But if this is so, and if, as is also true, he is minister of the Word and sacraments, then it must follow that guiding the Christian vocations of others is as indispensable an aspect of receiving responsibly the Word and sacraments as is preaching or pastoral care. If administering is being properly done, one does not, therefore, leave it in order to get back to the true ministry of the Word when he enters the pulpit or the study or the counseling room. Either administering is an essential mode of ministry of the Word, or else the Reformers were entirely wrong about universal priesthood and Christian vocation.

The Psychology of Administering

So far as time and insights permit, we have demonstrated in summary the theological bases of administration as an essential dimension of ministry. It is evident that the psychological attitude making possible the risk of investing one’s most precious projects unto others in consultation involves some basic surrender of the notion that ministry is what one does by himself. Conversely, inability so to invest, or the more frequent grumbling about the investment, are rooted in an attitude that at some level still regards basic consultation as an enemy of ministry.

This point brings us full circle to the reported fact that what ministers most dislike is their administrative and executive duties. In attempting to correct this point of view, I have so far drawn on two main lines of argument. The first is the injunction to efficiency in administration, lest administration be wrongly equated with poor administration. The second has been to give some vision, with a theological searchlight, of the context in which administration should be understood. I turn now, third and finally, to one additional line of argument in attacking the prejudice against administration; namely, a direct attack to expose the partly hidden motives of the administration-hater.

He who dislikes administration has a feeling, somewhere inside him, that this sort of thing is "secondhand." There is no direct pristine line from pastoral intention to ecclesiastical performance (as there seems, deceptively, to be in regard to preaching and pastoral care). Instead, one has to enter a labyrinth. Instead of the committee’s clear, well-informed, and spontaneous formulation of a plan that executes perfectly and automatically what the minister had in mind, one has to listen to that garrulous Mr. Jones, whose knowledge of the Bible is abysmal and whose preoccupation with the surgery he had two years ago is unflagging, and to Mrs. Smith, who has always found some odd thing in some odd church magazine that she thinks we might try here and which is always irrelevant to the business at hand, and to Dr. Brown, who has a big income himself but seizes every opportunity to ensure that the minister shall prove his piety by his poverty. How could God conceivably believe that a true ministry should involve working with committees that contain people like this? In putting it this way, a minister is of course saving that he is too important and his time is too valuable to waste in educating or changing or shepherding people while he is engaged in consulting them. Thus he has no inner readiness for consultation at all. He may talk about encounter, but he demonstrates his ignorance of its meaning. There can be no I-Thou relationships with rubber stamps or sycophants.

Another related thing we may say about the administration-hater is that risks make him fearful. To commit one’s time and energies, and his best interpretations and arguments, to decision in which others share must inevitably be an anxiety-inducing business unless one has a bit of a psychological free-swing about him. But one can have this kind of attitude only if, in fact, he is not inwardly compelled to feel defensive about his work and its results. If one feels securely that he has been given a treasure, and the treasure is not of the kind that is dissipated by sharing, then he can risk (within some prudent and intelligent limits) freely and even gladly. Psychologically speaking, he learns that even his aggressive energies are meant for the service of God, no less than his tenderness and his concern. But if he feels threatened, he cannot risk. And in that case his first question to himself should be not how to get out of the administrative involvement but exactly what does put him on the defensive. There surely must be some connection between the fear of risk and what I believe to be the fact: that the administration-haters are also the ministers who complain most bitterly about the reluctance of laymen to assume responsibility.

There is likely to be also, among the disapprovers of administration, quite a bit of perfectionism. There is always a certain nobility of aim in even the most disastrous perfectionism. What one does should be done well, it says. But it turns out ordinarily that what one wants to be able to do well is what no one else can evaluate; and hence the motive behind the perfectionism is not excellence of performance but freedom from appraisal. Of all the aspects of ministry, administering is that in which appraisal of the minister is most open and unconcealed. The minister who cannot receive appraisal with some kind of objective but serious ear is in a poor position to guide his people to find their Christian vocation, for that too rests upon appraisal.

Finally, I think there is a kind of "merit-badge" psychology at work in those who dislike administration. In a way one can, after a sermon or a pastoral interview, attach another bar to his pin. He knows he has been a minister; he preached or acted as shepherd. But with a committee or a pile of letters, no merit badge. In the terms of Gestalt psychology, one has not got "closure." Everything is open-ended. Now, without necessarily being against merit badges in the proper setting, which is for Boy Scouts, for adults to have their professional self-respect dependent upon their equivalent suggests at the least some deep interior doubt about the integrity of one’s commitment. On this point, as on the others, I do not intend merely to cast aspersions on those who hate administration (for some part of all of us feels this way), but rather to compel our rethinking of our motivations.

One other kind of comment is needed on the psychology of administration. No doubt you have already been thinking, "But what about those ministers who get so delightedly involved in the machinery and the wheels that they become no good at all about preaching, pastoral care, or anything else?" I would agree that this is a serious question, most of all in American churches. My argument for the essentiality of administering is in no way an invitation to neglect sermons, pastoral care, or anything else that is crucial in a total ministry.

But just what, from a psychological point of view, happens with the man whose delight is in the law of wheels turning round? He has, if I may use a psychoanalytic term, demonstrated that we may have "reaction-formations" in the ministry. In psychoanalysis a reaction-formation is said to appear when the automatic defense that is brought to bear against something that cannot be admitted takes a form precisely the opposite of what is being denied, as when a compulsive neatness appears on the surface to ward off riotous interior desires to be messy, or when effusive sweetness in words covers up an unadmitted desire to dominate. The minister wholly occupied with turning wheels is, in all probability, distracting himself from the emptiness he believes he would find if he took his mind off wheels and put it onto ministry. Even if such a person is called a good administrator, I believe that this is seldom true according to the criteria suggested in the present discussion. He is not so much working through and with other people in a common task, about which he bears particular kinds of responsibilities, as he is keeping himself so busy that he need not ask what is unique about ns vocation. Thus, he is least of all prepared to understand the present discussion. In contrast, the minister with a bit of administration-hating in him is far more likely to make enough change in his outlook to become a proper administrator as an aspect of his total ministry.

Limitations of the Administering Image

Finally, let me remind you that the administering image, valuable as it is when it is rightly understood, is still a cross-section, a cartoon, that has temporarily neglected some things in order to give proper emphasis to other things. Let us make sure that we beat off in advance some possible misinterpretations.

Someone might say, "How do we know that this picture is a Christian one? Could it not just as well be a picture of a democratic society?" As stated, it could indeed be so. But this is no handicap in a cartoon if we grasp both its intent and its context. Indeed, the preaching image simply showed an open book, and we had to imagine the right context in order to see that this book was manifestly the Bible. To try to make clear our administering image, of course we might put all three men on their knees. But not only would that require the minister to be a contortionist in putting his hands on the shoulders of the others; it would also mean that the men would have to bow their heads, and the reference in the actual image to their work to be done in the world might be clouded. Perhaps each layman could be carrying a Bible; or one layman a Bible and the other some symbol of service such as a cup. Yet all such suggestions really miss the point. No cartoon image can present the whole context in which it is to be understood. To try to make it do so makes it lose its power.

In similar vein, someone else may ask, "How do we really know the difference between the minister and the others, when they are all dressed alike?" If it suits the sartorial aspects of the fellowship, I suppose I can concede a robe or a reversed collar. But certainly not a frock coat. Such queries could be endless. Why are they all men? Why not a woman and a child? An older person? Someone who is ill? All such questions do indeed remind us that we are dealing with a cartoon, with an attempt at emphasis that must, for the time being, leave certain other things unexplicit. But this procedure is, in actual fact, the way the human mind works — from a vague, diffuse, and blobby kind of general perception, in the direction of increasing specificity, and then back to a much more accurate and articulated whole. Our cartoons are neither the first nor the last word. But they are very important somewhere in the middle.

I conclude with a rather risky word about God. A great part of the content of our Christian faith declares that God, although free to do otherwise, did actually create us in his own image, which includes some significant measure of freedom and of capacity to love; that we have individually and collectively misused our freedom and not cultivated our love capacity; that an astoundingly radical procedure was used to get us humans out of our predicament; and that it is the constant privilege and duty of the church to testify to the salvation already wrought and to bring all men and ourselves to receive it. But when we look at actual existence, we have to begin theologizing, that is, acknowledging the complications. And at that point there is no reflective Christian who has not at some time asked the question, "Was God out of his mind to entrust this most precious treasure to people like us and churches like ours?" And if he has answered the question rightly, he has finally said, "Yes, we are as bad as that; but God was willing to risk it, and he must know what he is doing."

If even God felt it wise and right and essential to risk his purposes and his love through fallible human instruments, who is a minister to be unwilling to acknowledge that his ministry must be risked through fallible human beings who are, in actual fact, no more fallible than he?

Ever since the days of the Reformation, the dominant image of the Protestant ministry, often so obtrusive that it threatened to eliminate all others, has been that of the preacher. In cartoon-image terms it has shown1 a preacher in a pulpit with an open Bible before him.

It will be suggested later on that the total Reformation conception of the ministry was more subtle than this cartoon suggests, and was more complex than it became in some later periods. But it is certainly a fact that this image was primary, both at the time of Luther and Calvin and in most subsequent periods of most Protestant groups.

The preacher in the Pulpit with an open Bible before him represented a considerable shift from the image that had been dominant during the Middle Ages. In that era the dominant image, as H. Richard Niebuhr rightly noted, was of a priest before an altar.

Before we come to an exposition of what early Protestants were trying to say positively with their new image, it is important to understand precisely what struck them as negative about the image of the Middle Ages.

The medieval image was rejected for two basic reasons. First, Protestants wanted to reject completely any possible notion that the original sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross could or should be repeated in any form 1n order to make it efficacious for the salvation of men. Whether or not they were right in attributing the motif of efficacy through repetition to the Roman Catholic Church is a question for historians to answer. At any rate, they believed so, and they believed it so strongly that they rejected every image that could carry even a residual flavor of sacrificial repetition. For in the medieval image the priest was not merely praying; he was also offering a sacrifice.

Second, the early Protestants wanted to deny that the priest had a place before God that other Christians could not have. God’s saving grace in Jesus Christ was so incomparably great, they believed, that any man trusting solely in it might and should approach its throne. Every trace of the notion that the keys of the Kingdom, or the resources of grace, were held by a particular group of men had to be pushed away. In the medieval image it was the priest alone who belonged before the altar. Hence this image had to go.

The basic reasons for rejecting the dominant medieval image of the ministry were, then, compelling; and, if we leave aside the details, I suspect they still are. And yet there were other meanings symbolized in the medieval image that Protestants did not reject, or at any rate ought not to have rejected. But since the image had to be rejected as a whole, these positive meanings had to go, along with the negative ones; and the loss has not always been in Protestantism’s favor.

What were the positive aspects of the medieval image that ought not to have been lost sight of when the image as a whole was rejected? First, there should be no objection to the priest’s facing God, especially if he is on his knees, provided only that he is not, in principle, alone. There is everything to commend in the attitude of humility, or thanksgiving, or petition, or intercession before God, so long as the person with the attitude is not usurping prerogatives either of God himself or of the whole congregation of Christians. If the priest, kneeling, had been joined by a nonpriest Christian or two, there should have been no objection to the image.

Second, I believe the early Protestants should have had no objection to priest and people kneeling before some kind of table, provided the table or even "altar" is understood in terms of commemoration and communion and thanksgiving and not as a symbol of pretentious repetition. Indeed, one must go further and say that there is every merit in the reminder that the most extreme sacrifice has been made unto man’s salvation. It is not the reality of blood and suffering that is to be eliminated or cleaned up, but any suggestion that the sacrifice by Jesus Christ is not sufficient.

Although this is only a footnote to the main line of this address, we may properly note in passing that some of Protestantism’s subsequent difficulties with prayer and the devotional life, and with religious symbolism, come from neglect of those aspects of the medieval image of ministry that ought not to have been set aside.

We can, then, conceive the possibility that early Protestants, instead of creating a wholly new dominant image of ministry, might have corrected and cleaned up the medieval image. The priest could have been joined, in the revised image, by other Christians. The altar could have become a table or a praying station. Perhaps a cross, if rude enough, could have symbolized the once-for-all character of the sacrifice being recalled. But the fact is that the Reformers, who felt they were confronted with a revolutionary, all-or-nothing situation, were in no mood to tinker and amend. They had much bigger apologetic fish to fry, and for their purpose an entirely new dominant image was needed.

The Intent of the Preaching Image

The new image was a preacher before a pulpit with an open Bible. The positive intent of this preaching image was as follows.

First, the presence of the Bible showed the centrality of the Word of God. This was not, as we shall see on further analysis of the image, a naive biblicism that equated God’s Word with the literal words of the Bible. But it did rightly declare that the Word of God comes to men through the Bible, and hence the Bible is indispensably present in the image. If men are to be at all attentive to the Word, they must do so through attentiveness to the Bible, not necessarily exclusively but always normatively. The Bible is both the primary communication medium and the criterion of truth.

But the image, second, is not confined to the portrayal of the Bible. There is present also a human being, a preacher. To human beings the Bible is not automatically self-interpreting. Whatever the Word may be, it is not an automatic answer that comes through the Bible as the solution of a complex problem in mathematics today comes through a giant electronic computer. The Word requires human communication. The Bible, giving testimony to the Word, requires human interpretation. Thus the preacher in the Reformation image was not excess baggage. He was not a concession. He was not present simply to symbolize human beings as receivers of the Word, although he was indeed also a receiver. He and his function are declared, by the image, to be necessary to the proclamation, communication, reception, and assimilation of the Word. It is clearly out of order to make apologetic statements about the presence of a preacher in this image. He is just as important to the whole intent of the image as is the Bible, and this fact should be stated authoritatively.

Third, the image also contains, in addition to the Bible and the preacher, a pulpit. In modern language the intent of the pulpit is to symbolize connectives or connectors. The pulpit is a connector in two senses. On the one hand, it is the means of relating the preacher and the Bible; and, on the other hand, it is a means of relating the Word from the Bible through the preacher to the people, including the preacher as, along with the people, also a receiver. Thus the pulpit is not simply a symbol of any old kind of connection, but of a connection that is proper and patterned. If we had a Bible and a preacher but no pulpit, the kind of connectedness that might exist between preacher and Bible, and hence between people and Word, might be quite arbitrary. Or, to use modem language, it might be professionally irresponsible. The pulpit symbolizes responsibility to the people. Even the truest of words, to put it sharply, are not enough if they contain no responsible attempt at communication. Thus the pulpit too belongs in the image. It is as indispensable as the Bible and the preacher. The total image conveys the many and subtle relationships among this triad: Bible, preacher, and pulpit. Without exhausting the image, at least a few additional aspects of the subtle symbolism of the image may profitably be mentioned.

There is, for example, the fact that the Bible is open. We may hope that it was not opened for the first time only when the preacher approached the pulpit. Certainly, as early Protestantism made clear, it had to be studied, as diligently and intelligently as possible, well in advance of any specific attempts to preach. And yet such study, the image tells us, was never to be rounded off in such fashion that the preacher could dispense with the open message during his preaching. The Living Word is a contemporaneous Word. It is not enough even for the preacher to have been attentive to it an hour, or fifteen minutes, before preaching. Even a recently warmed-over Word is still a leftover; and no matter if it were once cooked with gas or even radiant heat, it is still unfit for human consumption if the covers are closed around it now.

The fact that the Bible is open during the preaching says something to the people. It says that the preacher is contemporaneously, right now, attentive to the Word as it works right now, and not merely to recollections, intimations, memories, impressions, or other historical data. It suggests that every point he makes is, right now, checked against the message of the Word conveyed through the Bible.

But the Bible’s being open has also a symbolic message to the preacher. The coincidence of open Bible and open mouth comes in that order, and not in reverse! Revelation precedes otolaryngological demonstration. Geographically speaking, his preaching is always over and through the Bible, since it is open. It is never merely about or across the Bible. If the Word does not, right now as well as in previous study, speak to him, it cannot speak through him to the people. But let him have no feelings of deprecation about manifesting his tonsils. The open mouth is necessary, proper, and good, regardless of its dental aesthetics. Even smelly molars or tonsils laden with staphylococci, while not recommended, cannot impede communication of the Word in preaching. If the Bible is truly open, the mouth may also be open — Another subtlety of the image is about who holds what. The Bible is held by the pulpit, not by the preacher. And that which holds the pulpit, whether it be floor, dais, or chancel, also holds the preacher. The preacher has no standing not shared by the pulpit. And the Bible is so supported that the preacher need not worry about its falling. Both preacher and pulpit have a common foundation.

The symbolism of all this is virtually self-explanatory. The pulpit, which represents both the people and the preacher’s professional responsibility, not only shares its foundation with the preacher but is also on the same level as he. The people are not inferior. The preacher is no better than they. He stands where he stands, which is an uplifted position, because of his functional responsibility, not because of his character or his merit. It is not he who is lifted up but his function; but since he is lifted no higher than the pulpit, so are the people lifted up in their function of hearing and receiving the Word. Whatever lifting there be is shared.

Yet another suggestion of the total image concerns the way in which living and non-living realities are to be joined in human life and for human salvation. The Word is a living Word, but it is testified to and conveyed through a Book which, as book, is not organically alive. The preacher is a living human organism, as are the other people to whom the Word is also life and salvation. Preacher — Word — people: these are all alive. Discourse — Book — behavior: these are all, in a significant sense, dead because they are nonorganic. But life, the image suggests to us, is never to be apprehended with simple directness, alone and in itself. The order of the Word is "no angel visitants, no opening skies." it is, instead, through death to life, through the nonorganic to the organic, through the Book to the Living Word, through the three dead homiletical points to just possibly a receptive heart or two. Homiletically speaking, in the midst of life we are in death; and only if we learn to tolerate death — a Book and not an angel, an idea and not just a feeling, a conviction and not merely a charitable impulse — can we approach life.

The Reformation and Medieval Images

Having now set forth at least the principal meanings and symbolic implications of the dominant Reformation image of the ministry, we may return to a comparison and contrast of this image with that of the medieval period: preacher — pulpit — open-Bible in relation to priest-before-altar.

We are at once constrained to ask of the Reformation image: What has happened to knees? Are we not to confront God, or is it enough to confront one another? And why are no people but the preacher shown? Let us consider these questions in order.

We begin with knees, housemaid’s or otherwise. Can the dominant Reformation image of the ministry be tenable if nobody is on his knees? Can even God tolerate a people and a preacher who have presumably taken his work in the sacrificial and costly atonement of Jesus Christ, his Son and our Lord, if their leading image of ministry and servanthood is devoid of genuflection? Is it "stiff-necked" to substitute stand-up talk and sit-down listening for the thanksgiving and confession that call for some other posture? Perhaps the priest in the medieval image had an inflated notion of the power of his knees. But at least he acknowledged by his kneeling. God’s transcendence. In the preaching image, who acknowledges any transcendence to anything? The preacher is looking horizontally, alternating between a dip at the open Bible and a stance toward the people. But in neither instance is he truly bowing his head or raising it in adoration.

In the Reformation image there is a book instead of an altar. An altar at least implies sacrifice, once-for-all or otherwise. But a book — paperback, hard-cover, first edition, or translation — may mean almost anything, or nothing. How can a book, even the Book, substitute for the clear and concrete symbolism of sacrifice on the part of our Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, who became flesh and suffered on the cross for our sake? Surely a book is poor even as a reminder of what, through sacrificial atonement, has given us life. And the preacher in the Reformation image, whose sides have not been riven, is hardly a compensation.

The only sustainable answer to these objections is that the Reformation, while frying its particular fish, expected the toaster and the coffee pot and the sandwich broiler to be going on as usual. It was not against kneeling or atonement or prayer, or looking upward to God. It thought that it took such things for granted. But their absence from the explicit image of ministry is not above reproach, and we may continue to ask about knees and transcendence.

When something is taken for granted and not articulated, it may cease to serve as a check on various possible kinds of distortions. Thus the absence from the dominant image of the ministry in Protestantism of the permanent truths in the medieval image helped later Protestant rationalism and intellectualism to become stiff-necked and rigid and even arrogant; pietism to become detached and legalistic and self-righteous; emotional and anti-intellectual groups to become aesthetically barren and theologically illiterate; and some liturgical-minded groups to conclude that the calluses on their knees entitled them to wear plugs in their ears.

There is certainly nothing in the Reformation image itself that gives warrant for rigidity, legalism, obscurantism, or wooliness. The fact that the preacher is standing before the open Bible and pulpit is not a negation of prayer and adoration but is making central the communication and reception of the Word of God. The fact that the Bible is open on the pulpit is no denial that forehanded Bible study is needed. The presence of the pulpit in an elevated position is no invitation to arrogance or dogmatism, but a symbol that both preacher and people are lifted up to hear the Word of God. And the fact that a human being is a necessary communicator of the Word surely does not make his communications infallible.

Yet it is unmistakably true that some of the distortions of the preaching image have resulted, directly or indirectly, from the loss of positive elements of the medieval image which were discarded, along with the unacceptable elements, when the new Protestant image was created.

Pathologies of the Reformation Image

The most serious, troublesome, and subversive distortions of the ministry in Protestantism have come, however, from literalizing some single aspect of the preaching image and ignoring the indispensability of all the parts and the subtlety of their symbolic interrelationships.

Some of the pathologies of the ministry have already been alluded to, but we shall now try to be more systematic. First and most obviously, there is distortion when any one of the three main elements in the preaching image is lifted out of its context and set forth uncritically. If this is done to the Bible, even to the open Bible, it leads to biblicism or fundamentalism. The Book is confused with the Word. The preacher becomes a cross between a detective and a district attorney. And the pulpit becomes nothing but a reading stand. Surely this is pathology.

An exclusive emphasis on pulpit is also a distortion. This may mean such an exaltation of worship or of church edifice as the setting for preaching that the missionary nature of the church is forgotten and the Word is brought only to the supposedly faithful. Even more disastrously, it may mean that the central function of ministry is felt to be a discourse on Sunday morning, containing a lead, three points, and a thought for next week, not to exceed twenty-five minutes in length, set forth in a tone any self-respecting human being would reject if approached privately. Again, wrenching pulpit out of context may make it into a kind of barricade, so that utterances from behind it are impenetrable to criticism except by God, who has, with this kind of performance, undoubtedly slept through the whole thing and is too bored to criticize.

When the preacher is taken out of the context of the preaching image and treated as the whole ministerial cheese, the results are the most dire of all. This may lead to preacher cults, which are not ordinarily started by ministers but are too often gratefully received by them. A preacher who is very short on theological acumen, biblical understanding, existential relevance, and human sensitivity may nevertheless receive adulation if be has something that will probably be called "personality." Without advocating drabness or monotony, and certainly not the denial of the minister’s individuality, we may properly look askance when both Bible and pulpit receive only conventional nods and neither is permitted to stand in the way of the preacher’s rapport with his audience. And it is, in this instance, aim audience, and neither a congregation nor the people of God.

It has always interested me that the principal point made in the account of the first group of run-of-the-mine Christian preachers, the seventy, is aimed precisely against this distortion in the outlook of the preacher. When the seventy returned from their first engagements, they reported, in astonishment and delight, that the tools and powers given them by their Lord in his commission had actually worked. They were told by Jesus, "Do not rejoice that the spirits are subject to you; but rejoice that your names are written in heaven."

To take any one of the basic elements of the preaching image of the ministry, therefore, as exclusive, or to lift it out of context of the whole, produces pathology; and hardly anything that can be imagined has failed to happen in actual life. But there have been other distortions of the ministry when the delicate relationships among the elements of this image have been lost sight of. We shall note a few of them.

One such distortion is a kind of premature closure on this image as if it represented the whole goal of Christian faith and life instead of what it actually is, the basic mode of ministry to evoke faith and life. One of the real glories of the preaching image is its unabashed concern with means as essential to the achievement of ends. It shows its faith that the goals will come if there is faithful attentiveness to the communication of the Word. Its suspiciousness of goals, inattentive to the means of approaching them, is thoroughly dynamic, entirely correct, and certainly biblical.

But the preaching image of ministry is not the goal of either Christian faith or Christian life. One distortion, of which such a sophisticated theology as Barth’s is not entirely innocent, is so to cloud the distinction between the preaching image and the faith and life of the people, including the preacher in the world, that speaking and hearing a reasonable facsimile of the Word of God is in danger of being confused with the mission of the church to the world and the vocation of Christians before God but to the world’s need. If you want more cartoon images, as my mind always does, think of this particular pathology as the "hydraulic fallacy." The Living Water of the Word, by this analogy, gushes down from heaven by spiritual gravity and divine love, and pulpits are or ought to be its fire hydrants. So far, the analogy has much to commend it. I also like the general suggestion that the congregation can do with a drenching, provided it is conceded that all properly human hydrants have a leaky valve at the rear, to assure that the preacher also gets wet. But from here on, hydraulics is deceptive. People and preacher will get dried off, at least until next Sunday; and the water runs down drains or ruins carpets, doing no one any good in particular.

I do not quite know how to save this figure of spiritual hydrology for the Kingdom of God without a bit of silliness. But if you will stand that, it can be done. Suppose that both preacher and layman are equipped with living water sacs. Today, of course, these would be leak-proof, flame-proof, loss-proof, and thermally insulated. Each sac will be no bigger than the person can handle. But each sac will also have a good spiritual sprayer attached, wholly free of technical complications. As we might say today, fully dynamic but with no moving parts — which is nice work if you can get it. Anyhow, each sac, in our imaginative picture, is used to spray living water during the next week precisely where it has the greatest chance to do good. Thus, the real box score of the act of ministry symbolized by the preaching image is not back there at all, but is rather in the appraisal of the remote and mundane hydrolysis the next week. To be sure, I agree that all this carries hydraulics a bit too far. But II am a bit tired of contemplating those drenched parishioners back in their pews. If they are stupid enough to sit there until they get pneumonia, let them not blame it on the Word. No doubt they will be prudent enough to dry themselves. But the fact is that the living water is not just for them; it is for their ministry to the world. If we really want to perpetuate this hydraulic analogy, we must go all the way with it; and I have the appalling fear that the end product may be a new kind of hosanna!

Less popular than the hydraulic notion of ministry but even more reprehensible, if you will continue to permit these analogies from elementary physics, is what may be called the "gaseous image of ministry." According to this, and no doubt in the name of something misrepresented as Spirit, everything becomes vaporous. The Reformation image, with a heavy Bible, a weighty pulpit, and an overweight preacher, all fades into some kind of aura. The gaseous goal of ministry is the creation of some kind of subjective feeling. Commonly this feeling may be described as good, as comfortable, as relieved, as positive, or even, so help us, as Christian. But it may be more subtle. It may be a feeling of "Thank God he beat me to a pulp" when the preacher has let loose with some version of fire and brimstone, even the cellophane-wrapped kind of our day. In any event, the gaseous figure of ministry limits its conceptions of the functions of ministry to subjective feelings as experienced here and now. I find myself too gravely tempted to comment, and cannot resist, that the individual molecules of a gas are wholly unpredictable and that we can predict only their mass behavior, Thus the gaseous figure of ministry is, despite its disclaimers, inherently impersonal and anti-individual. The true preaching image of ministry is not.

I have dealt with liquids and gases, and you may well wonder if I have anything to say about solids. Of course I do, but it is a bit anticlimactic. In the Reformation preaching image the Word of God may wrongly be equated with the solid lines of type in the book; the solidity of the pulpit may be misrepresented as the authoritativeness of something or other; and the preacher’s power to interpret may be mistakenly equated with some kind of weight — not necessarily the girth of his stomach, but perhaps the athletic cut of his shoulders, or more probably the weightiness of his voice. You may, if you like, pursue the figure of solids, and profitably. But these implications are, if I may say so, "duck soup." Liquids and gases, on the other hand, are elusive, and deserve the greater attention they have been given.

Let me remind you that the immediate point has been pathologies in the conception of ministry arising from subtle distortion of the relations among the three elements in the dominant Reformation image of ministry: Bible, pulpit, and preacher. I have turned to the most elementary notions of physics to get at some of these. With equal profit I might have turned to elementary chemistry and shown, for example, that our useful and harmless table salt comes from two deadly poisons, sodium and chlorine. To be sure, in that case I might have to put on an argument to demonstrate that the Bible and the preacher are both deadly poisons — but I think that I finally could manage this.

In this brief account of pathologies of the preaching image I might of course have gone lightly on figures and analogies and moved heavily toward literal description. Since the Bible does not change, and the pulpit changes only aesthetically, that would have meant describing one or another kind of distorted attitude in preachers. Preacher attitudes may be narcissistic, solipsistic, arrogant, aggressive, masochistic, dependent, detached, wistful, whimsical, smug, snobbish, threatened, and so on to the limits of the dictionary of pejoratives. But is there any real value in a systematic categorization of all the attitudinal ills that preacher flesh is heir to? Perhaps there might be. Certainly all preacher flesh including my own, needs to think in self-appraisal about such matters. But the elaboration of this notion is not my task at this point, however important it may eventually be to our common concern.

For now, it is enough to acknowledge that the very best image of the ministry, which might or might not be Bible-pulpit-preacher, is always subject to pathological distortions. If it were not so, somebody like John Calvin would have assured us. Since he did not, we must make the best of it, and resolve to analyze the pathologies.

Preaching and...

I have indeed attempted to interpret and defend the basic Reformation image of the ministry, with its representation of preacher before open Bible on pulpit. There is nothing in any age — be it atomic, anxious, organization-man, or one-world — that renders this image superfluous, if we understand it aright. No apologies are needed for its projection into 1975.

What this image properly declares is that the Living Word of God is relevant and decisive for all sorts and conditions of men provided they will hear and heed; that the Word comes through men who, even until the eleventh preaching hour, study and try to be receptive to it as given through the Bible in dialogic reflection upon life experience; and that the pulpit is the juncture point of Word and interpretation. This image is basic but not exhaustive. It assumes things that are not made explicit in it.

Backward, it assumes a Christian community that comes to church not solely to feel better but also to find its Christian duty and vocation. Forward, it assumes empowerment and guidance on what the Christian — every Christian — actually does in and to and for the world.

No single image can get all that in. Every image must be a cross-section. It is like a color slide. Perhaps this is why, with all my concern for movement and dynamics, I have finally given up home movies and have concentrated on stills. Properly presented and interpreted, stills also may be dynamic, as the preaching image shows.

Like every other image of ministry that will come before us for serious inspection, the preaching image emphasizes some things and neglects others. Always, in order to understand properly the emphasis a cartoon image is making, it is necessary mentally to add to it what it assumes but does not make explicit. In the preaching image we need especially to add the following items. First, a congregation is to be added. It is now presupposed. Second, add a previous view of the preacher working on the open Bible in his study before he comes to preach from it in the pulpit. Third, add a later view of preacher and congregation all going out into the world, to serve its needs and to communicate the Christian gospel to it. Fourth, add some befores and afters that include prayer, adoration, singing, and communion. The preaching image is properly set in this larger context, and we distort it if we are unaware of that context. But of course if we insisted on the literal inclusion of all these elements, we should have no image at all but only a kind of filmstrip. Let us, by all means, keep the image. But let us be aware of why it emphasizes what it does.

Preaching and Pastoral Care

The continuing utility of any particular image of ministry depends partly upon what we find, on analyzing it, that it truly represents, and how important we believe that to be. But it may depend also upon our ability to separate from the image some kinds of meanings that may have become attached to it and which conflict with meanings of other important images that we wish to retain. In our day one of the most important questions about the preaching image is this: Does it conflict with pastoral care? Even though our account has not yet set forth the image of pastoral care, we can still make a preliminary appraisal of the preaching image to see whether, as is often charged, it is in opposition to the ministry of pastoral care.

The question is sometimes posed in this way. In preaching the minister is supposed to speak from the Word of God, and he is not to please or placate any man. He is to speak the truth in love as God gives him to see the truth. But in pastoral care we are to listen to people, to accept them, to be sensitive and considerate to see things from their point of view. Can these injunctions be reconciled? Or must a minister be one kind of person in preaching and quite another in pastoral care?

We may begin to get toward an answer to this question — and I believe there is one — by first making a longer statement of the question from each perspective.

In preaching the minister must indeed speak the whole gospel — not in every sermon, but eventually. Indeed, each partial speaking should point beyond itself in the direction of the whole gospel. And the minister should speak with humble authority; that is with an authority that transcends his person but is humble in its awareness of the limitations of that person. He humbly acknowledges himself to be a kind of midwife, and yet he knows he is charged to perform that function creatively. He cannot simply tell a congregation what it may want to hear, whether that is a coddling or a spanking. He must do his best to let the gospel speak truly, let the chips fall where they may. Even when he speaks "comfortable words" as appropriate parts of the gospel, he must remember that such words are to "enhearten" and not to make easy.

In pastoral care it is certainly necessary, whatever the minister may try to do eventually, that he begin by getting as far inside the frame of reference of the person as the person permits him to do. Not only is this necessary for any understanding of the other person in his concreteness. It is also necessary if the pastor wants to convey to the person acceptance that undercuts conflicts and divisions and doubts and fears. Acceptance is required not only at the horizontal level of interpersonal relationships but also in order to convey, beneath all the difficulties, the acceptance by God himself. If the pastor rejects part of the person, then it is difficult to demonstrate what God’s total acceptance may mean. And thus in pastoral care we do attempt to listen, to understand, to accept, and to clarify. We do not sound off lightly, telling the person what we think he should do with no notion of how, from the inside, he looks at life.

Are these two approaches as restated, then, incompatible? Do they require two different kinds of minister? Or is the apparent difference between them only situational and not fundamental? I believe the last to be true.

The preacher is indeed to preach the whole gospel. But as our image analysis has shown, he preaches nothing to other people that he does not also preach to himself. If that is so, he cannot possibly, on psychological grounds, treat the gospel as if some aspects of it merely called down vengeance on people. He can preach the critical, wrathful, or law aspects of the gospel to himself as well as to other people only if these judgmental dimensions are understood in a context of love that transcends or undercuts them. So understood, they may at times be negative, sharp, or hurting, but never simply so, and never out of context with a deeper love that makes the hurt or the sharpness both tolerable and acceptable.

Only the man who knows he has been forgiven can know the enormity of his sin. Only the preacher deeply aware that even God’s judgment is a manifestation of his love can acknowledge its reality, for himself and others, and realize that the very capacity to acknowledge it is itself a demonstration of the grace that guides it. And since he is communicating this subtle relationship to others as well as articulating it for himself, he cannot possibly succeed unless he gets inside the frame of reference of others. If they view God’s judgment as a simple negativity, and react defensively against it, he must acknowledge and articulate this error, and demonstrate that it is an error. Even his most prophetic utterances cannot remain unconcerned with the frame of reference of others. He may indeed try to alter opinions, to correct errors, to demonstrate truth. And some people may reject his interpretations. But a God whose judgment is only a situational difference within the context of his love cannot properly be represented, at any point, as intending a simple negative.

When we turn, in the light of these preaching comments, to pastoral care, the critical question is whether the attempts to understand and accept, to get inside the other person’s frame of reference, to apprehend and help to clarify the nature of his specific conflicting feelings, all together imply the absence of judgment. The answer is certainly not; instead, this is the one framework in which judgments in the Christian sense can be realized and accepted.

Suppose that you or I, in exercising our pastoral care function, have done all the things that my books on this matter have advocated and which I sometimes remember to carry out myself. Suppose that we have been understanding; that, without probing or pressing, we have grasped the subtle and specific nature of the interior and conflicted viewpoint of the person, and have begun to help him sort out and clarify all these inner feelings. Certainly the person, with this kind of help, will begin to feel some kind of release. But release is never unaccompanied by exposure. The joyful awareness that some shackles have been removed is at once followed by the recognition that the old defenses and excuses, previously justified by the shackles, will no longer do. One is tempted, despite his new joy in freedom, to revert, to deny that the more realistic self-judgment is meaningful and relevant. The critical and decisive stage comes when he either accepts the new judgment as benevolent or retreats from it. He simply cannot enjoy the gains of freedom without accepting the responsibilities it brings. With pastoral help, he may take both.

Thus, the true manifestation of acceptance and understanding in the relationship of pastoral care is not some simple positivity, as if one felt two degrees better today and four degrees tomorrow. There is no simple upward line. If genuine, learning to feel joy means, should the situation warrant it, equal increase in ability to feel sad. In pastoral care all this has little or nothing to do with who says what to whom. The experience of assimilating judgment is impressively important. The pastoral utterance of judgmental words may or may not be relevant to this end, and certainly is not relevant if the context appears to be rejection or misunderstanding.

Preaching is not, procedurally speaking, pastoral care to larger numbers of people. Pastoral care is not, procedurally speaking effective preaching to one person. Such literalistic notions distort both functions. But in terms of fundamental aims and attitudes there is astonishingly little difference between preaching and pastoral care or pastoral counseling. Both make progress as that which is unpleasant but necessary becomes capable of assimilation because of the context, environment, atmosphere, and conviction that manifests the love within judgment, the grace within or beneath law, the freedom within responsibility. And in preaching and pastoral care alike, apparently these things can appear only in relationship.

There are many procedural differences between preaching and pastoral care. Both involve realms of expert knowledge that must be studied directly and cannot merely be inferred or derived. But if these learning processes have been undergone, through experience as well as thinking, then it is unthinkable that preaching and pastoral care, rightly understood and humbly practiced, can be in fundamental contradiction within the functions of the Christian minister.

This book focuses upon the functions of the ministry as seen through cartoon-like images. It attempts a reasonable degree of comprehensiveness about those functions, but it does not exhaust them. It makes no apology for setting functions in the front row — instead of, for example, the aims of the ministry, the biblical bases of the ministry, the theology of the ministry, the history of the ministry, the structures of the ministry, or many other possible approaches. Good books have been written about the ministry in all these categories, and my discussion is attentive to them. Certainly all these perspectives upon the ministry, and others, are of great importance.

From my experience of leading literally scores of ministers’ conferences, however, I have become convinced that most American ministers — scholars though they may be — are functionalists at heart. I do not call us pragmatists (for I belong to this group) only because that then connotes a certain opportunism that I deny. "Functionalist" seems a milder and more descriptive term. We think and feel and work our way into even the most recondite of theoretical matters only by first exploring them in relation to our functions of ministry.

I believe that a similar functionalism is the great strength of American intellectual life in general. In our own field of concern, as in others, a native functionalist approach does not stop with functional analysis. It does move on to basic theoretical issues. And the increasing breadth and originality of American science and scholarship in general demonstrate that a functional beginning, among imaginative people, is a motivator for many things, including function, and not a quitting point.

In the sense that my own mind happens to work this way anyhow, beginning with a look at functions, I am a typical American minister. My own explorations into various theoretical realms — including psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, and theology itself — have all been pushed on by my functional beginnings.

I can never think something without thinking of doing it. Even the carpentry of the typewriter table upon which these words are being written (the top was made from an old and discarded wooden organ pipe from Miller Chapel of Princeton Seminary) was something I got into in terms of principles only after I had begun some "functions." I believe most American ministers are functionalists, at the start of their inquiries, in the sense I have been describing.

I have, therefore, girded up the loins of my typewriter and decided to breeze ahead — without having a first chapter on the ministry in the Bible, a second on the ministry in the early church, a third on ministry in the Middle Ages — and so on until finally we might get to the present. Of course such studies are of the greatest importance, and I am not ignorant of them. But a functional approach begins at another point and, if it is informed, goes back to the Bible and various stages of history not only for confirmation but also for needed correction. Within the limits of space and knowledge, I believe I have done this in the pages that follow. But if Professor S believes that nothing sensible can be written about the ministry unless the first chapter is called "The Ministry in the Bible," then I shall have to disappoint him. His insights may be even more important than mine. But he got worked up in one way, and I in another. And, if I am not mistaken, most American ministers got worked up through their functions, just as I have.

In every chapter that follows, beginning with the images of preaching, the analysis starts from function; but I trust it never stops there, but leads back to Bible and history and forward to potential creativity. But I do feel an obligation to say first some words from a theological and historical perspective about the minister whose functions are to be examined. That is the excuse of the present chapter. If the reader is already familiar with the current biblical, historical, theological, and new-dimensions discussions of the ministry, let him skip on quickly to the next chapter, where my own creative thinking begins. For those not familiar with many recent studies, however, from perspectives other than my own I present a kind of summary — but it is, of course, from a functional point of view. It asks finally: So what does that say about ministry in the light of what the ordained minister actually does?

I remain respectful of but unintimidated by the notion of the "ministry of the laity." Whatever Christ and the Church need to get done can of course never be done by ordained ministers alone. But neither can any of it be accomplished, especially in our modern world, by some people vaguely known as "laymen" unless the functional leadership activity within the church does something responsible of itself and with the laymen. I suspect that one of the reasons why the Continental churches are now making so much of the "ministry of the laity" is that they have had so little of it. In America we have, happily, had a lot of it. We should, therefore, be able to analyze the ordained ministry and its functions without having to nod every three minutes to Jerusalem or Mecca about the "layman."

The discussion that follows is about the biblical bases and the historical development of the ordained ministry, which means not special privilege but particular responsibility. After that, I shall get on with the central concern of the book—namely, functional analysis, through images, of the functions of the ordained ministry.

History of the Ordained Ministry

Scholars agree that the general structural form of what we now call the "ordained ministry" — according to which a particular person is given general oversight of all the activities of a particular Christian community — did not emerge in the church until early in the second century. This general overseer was at first called a "bishop," which simply means "overseer." The bishop’s principal associates at that period were "elders" and "deacons"; so that these three constituted a kind of multiple-staff ministry, but with the bishop as clearly the general coordinator or chairman. There were of course other Christians performing many functions of ministry or service; but they seem not to have held "Offices" in the same sense as bishops, elders, and deacons.

What is known about the ministry during the period of the first century must largely be inferred from the letters of Paul and the Pastoral Epistles. There was probably a good deal of variation in the organization charts. It is clear that ministry at first referred to all the services rendered by the Christian community, regardless of who rendered them. And since becoming a Christian in the first century meant a commitment affecting radically every aspect of life, it seems probable that the actual ministries were complex.

In terms of structure, however, it seems likely that the people who bore various titles in the first century — such as bishop or elder or healer or teacher — were not "officials" holding formal offices, as the bishops, elders, and deacons came to do in the early second century. It is not a correct inference to take Paul’s list in I Corinthians 12:28 — first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, then healers, administrators, speakers in various kinds of tongues — and see all of these as "set-aside" persons performing such functions on a specialist basis. The apostles had a special status as long as they lived, because they had known the Lord personally. Apparently the prophets and teachers did have an informal kind of status. But the other groups, such as the healers, were clearly not "officials."

The first-century picture is further obscured through the fact that Paul does not mention "elders" in relation to ministry; yet other parts of the New Testament show that the elders were prominent in Jerusalem and other places.

The best general inferences that can be made about the first century are as follows. First, the complex and often widely scattered Christian communities were so busy and joyful in performing the necessary functions of ministry that they handled the structural aspects informally, without constitution and bylaws — giving some status depending on the extent of the contribution but not regularizing this. Second, the exception in terms of clearly ascribed status was to the apostles, a point that is of special importance because of Paul’s regarding himself as one of the apostles even though he had not known Jesus during his earthly life.

It may certainly be argued from the biblical and first-century data that every Christian, in some appropriate ways, was to exercise ministry, that is, diakonia. But there is no evidence that leadership of a proper kind was scorned, or of sheer equalitarianism that failed to appreciate particular talent, even though leadership was not regularized into formal offices.

Many attempts through the history of the church have been made to use the New Testament and the first century as witnesses and prototypes of this or that particular structure of ministry. In the light of modem scholarship, these are bound to fail not only because of the paucity of data but also because the Christians of the first century were not preoccupied with ministry as office. What can properly be permanently inferred about the ministry from what we know of the first century seems as follows.

1. Ministry in general is always the total service of the total Christian community, whether in relation to its own members or to others.

2. Any kind of ministry must, however, be organized, so that leadership is always needed.

3. Leadership should be according to competence, however this be defined. The competence is ultimately functional, i.e., the combination of abilities that can best get the lob done.

4. While ministry focuses on communities and their outreach, special respect is to be accorded to the ministry that forms lines of communication among local groups. Witness Paul’s own work as chief example.

Beyond points like this, the first century does not tell us what the ordained ministry should be. It has sometimes been argued that the placing of prophecy and teaching in Paul’s list immediately after the apostles, with oversight following as a bad seventh, is a structural pattern that should be emulated. The conclusion seems unjustified. The vitality of the community might well rest primarily upon the prophetic witness that curried no favor, and upon the educative processes that cemented understanding of the gospel and commitment to it. But overseer or bishop or administrator ought properly to be interpreted as seeing that those things come first, no matter who performs them. First-century thinking, however, was simply not like that.

From the early part of the second century onward there have been only rare deviations from the notion that a local Christian community should have a general overseer, by whatever name he might be called. This is the principle that we still use in Protestantism about the ordained minister. He is not to perform himself all the functions that are needed. He is not to be a king giving orders without consultation, nor a hired man performing only such functions as the community votes. But he is local "bishop," overseer, supervisor, or facilitator of the total work of the total community.

It is instructive to contrast this almost uniform sociological conception of the ordained ministry in Christianity, Catholicism and Protestantism alike, with the history of the rabbinate in Judaism. Today in Western Europe and America the rabbi is a general leader and overseer just as priest and minister are in Christianity. This has been, however, a recent development. In the long centuries of Jewish life since biblical times the rabbi was the teaching leader but not the general leader; i.e., he was not responsible for overall supervision of affairs. And although there is not time here to deal with the data, I believe a case can be made that Christianity is alone among the religions of the world in this conception of ordained ministry as primarily general oversight over a local religious group, with the consequent obligations about training and competence that call the minister (whether he makes it or not) to some knowledge and skill about all the kinds of functions that will subsequently be discussed in this book. Perhaps it may turn out that the unique structural contribution of Christianity to group life is its implicit conception of "supervision."

During the second and third centuries of the Christian era the office of bishop was taken out of the local community and made into an area or district job. Succeeding the bishop in general oversight of the local group was the priest, the term itself actually deriving from "presbyter," meaning elder. The deacon remained as the principal associate of the priest.

From the third century onward the picture of the ministry was complicated by the rise of monasticism. After the early experiments by individual persons, the group life of special dedication that we know as monasticism began to grow; so that nearly every geographical area had both local churches for people in general and special Christian communities for monks. The abbots became the general overseers of the monastic communities in the same sense that priests were, by this time, general supervisors of general Christian communities. As monasticism grew, it had to have higher supervisory officials over larger areas; and so, under various names, the equivalent of monastic bishops developed. Both power and dignity tended to be ascribed in proportion to territory covered; the larger the area, the greater the status.

As the Middle Ages moved on, the church, including monastic life, became "big business." A group of monks who had entered the order to work (in the field for instance) and pray found that the serfs (tenant farmers) would take care of the fields. Monastic wealth built up, and the monks became entrepreneurs — an early version of secularization of the church. It was against this kind of situation that orders like the Franciscan and Dominican developed at the height of the Middle Ages. They were recalling the church from its newfound privilege of the ministry to diakonia and service; and they generally included friars or brothers, since monk or priest had come to connote privilege rather than service.

When the Protestant Reformation appeared, it criticized many things about the priesthood and monasticism as these had developed, but it did not question the monoepiscopal principle; that is, that any Christian community should have a general overseer or supervisor. Attentive to the New Testament conviction that ministry was service, to be exercised by all Christians appropriately, it developed both the doctrine of universal priesthood and that of Christian vocation of all Christians. At the same time it acknowledged "the ministry" as an office, as set apart, requiring preparation and special competence. The office was to be, however, conferred only by the selection of the community — set-apartness, but not imposition. The community to be served had a share in who their general overseer was to be. While the Reformation declared continually that all Christians hold the "keys" in common (not a prerogative of priest or bishop), nevertheless these keys were to be exercised only when authorized by the community. This was a check and balance system. Without an overseer, there would be anarchy. But if the overseer forgot that his exercising of the keys was by the explicit approval of those he served, he would or should be in trouble.

In its conception of ministry, therefore, Protestantism was trying to be realistic about power, yet to recall that all ministry is service. With its strong emphasis on preaching and teaching it paid tribute to functional competence as essential to significant service. And it worked to educate ordained ministers as the church had never worked before. It saw ministry as the exercise of supervisory responsibility but with the emphasis on service rather than privilege — and it saw the content of this mainly in terms of preaching. To separate itself from what it felt was the Roman "privilege" notion, it advised its ordained ministers to wear the Schaube, the gown of the secular scholar in the university. But it did, even in dress, acknowledge the speciality of the minister.

When North America was settled, the various churches at first simply carried with them the forms of ministry developed in Europe. But adaptation came very quickly — first to the wilderness, then to the cut-offness from the old countries, and finally to the movement westward of the frontier. Forms of church government differed; but nobody except the Quakers challenged the notion that a religious local community needed a general overseer, no matter whether he lived in (like the Baptist preachers who farmed during the week) or out (like the circuit riders of Methodism).

In America all churches had to begin as new congregations. Hence the function of oversight, of genera] administration, became crucial in a way it had not been in the state-related churches of the Continent and the British Isles. Changes and alterations were many. But everybody insisted, even while making the most radical changes, that nothing new was being introduced. The functionalism was good. But much of the theory about it was not.

As Christian churches developed in America — and many more kinds of them with the establishment first of religious toleration and then of religious freedom — the ordained minister tended to become more dependent on his relations with his local congregation than was true in Britain or on the Continent. He had to win not only their souls but also their money. If he were not to get fired or become neurotic, he had to develop a political and diplomatic expertise that was unnecessary to his opposite numbers in Europe or Britain. Thus, he had to become more sure of what he was about and of his competence to carry it out; or face more potentialities of disaster. The ministry, too, had its days of "rugged individualism," not in the sense of riding roughshod over other people but in terms of standing up to lonely leadership in a degree that no other group of ministers in Christian history had had to do.

The history of the ministry in America has rightly been called a movement of constancy in the direction of "evangelicalism," at least until the present century. This meant that the church and the ministers serving it were to save souls above all else. It is easy to criticize or even ridicule some of the soul-saving notions and tactics of those days. But the provincialisms should not blind us to the fact that this American evangelicalism was functional in its estimate of the ministry. Not: What is your status? But: How many souls have you saved? Don’t tell me your position. Tell me what you have done.

With the emergence of new concern in our own century for the people caught in problems of urbanization, racial discrimination, industrialization, and the like, the churches moved first — through the so-called social gospel movement — to correct the previous emphasis on soul-saving as dealing only with individual persons. In a more articulate way the tasks of ministry came to include work for justice, reconciling beyond the individual’s inner self and his family relationships. Perhaps all this at first was a bit too collective, and maybe it believed that progress could be made if you put your mind to it. But it was an essential development.

The social gospel did not talk much about the ministry. But it either exhorted ministers to get to work on social injustice, or encouraged laymen to prod their ministers — so that it accepted fully the fact that the ordained minister was the general overseer of a particular community of Christians.

By the time we reach our own generation, the first major bombshell about the ministry was detonated by Reinhold Niebuhr. We cannot simply go on with our evangelical concern for the person, he implied, and let other people and other institutions take care of social justice. All efforts for social justice are less than pure or sure, he continued. But the church and the minister must be in on them, even if only 51 percent convinced. The Sermon on the Mount must never be forgotten, but it is an "impossible possibility." Just make sure that our devotion to its ideals does not deter us from getting on with what needs to be done in this contingent world.

After Niebuhr’s shattering critique we began to get the impact of the big B’s: Barth, Bultmann, and Brunner, and eventually of Tillich. In a loose sense, this movement was called neo-orthodoxy. Its principal instrument was the Bible as understood by modern technical means of scholarship, attempting to be faithful to the biblical message beyond the biblical provincialisms. It tended to emphasize the ministry as proclamation of the Word of God, and sometimes became irrelevantly verbose in the process. Its virtue was the recapture of the biblical message with time-bound elements shorn away; and thus it had a spirit equally compounded of scholarly honesty and theological commitment.

Neo-orthodoxy challenged the pallid commitments to "ideals" and moralistic interpretations of them. It caught the minister up short when he said we should "love one another" and failed to show that love in this sense is an impossible possibility," or at least very difficult. It told the ministry to stop being so smug about what it had done and to listen to the Word of God about what it might do. It even made a few passes at taking modern science and other knowledge into account.

But neo-orthodoxy, despite its great virtues as corrector, has not been able to achieve a viable reinterpretation of the ministry. It has been shockingly unconcerned about what a minister does — except the ambiguous "proclamation" of the gospel. Eduard Thurneysen has tried to redefine pastoral care as appropriate proclamation of the Word to individual persons and families. All this breaks down. It is an excellent critique that has not found a way of constructing.

In the very recent past, many of the discussions of ministry have been efforts to remind us that ministry is diakonia, or service, and relates to all members of the Christian community. This is true and necessary, but such discussion has tended to evade the question: So what, then, is the task of the ordained minister?

As in the long history of the church, we are not today without special interest groups — many of them of merit in what they do — in interpreting the nature of the ministry. Some of them still carry old denominational convictions; for instance, about continuity in the Anglican Church, the rejection of a set-aside ministry in parts of the Society of Friends, the parity of the ministry in the Reformed tradition, and no ordination without a call from a local church as in much of Lutheranism.

The ecumenical movement has stimulated many discussions of ministry that face forthrightly the differences among Christian groups, almost always held by each group to be consequent upon its theory of the church. These differences must still be taken with great seriousness. And yet they are astonishingly little connected with function and service, and are very obviously related to status and privilege. I do not yet know of a serious ecumenical discussion of the ministry that has consistently put function and service in the foreground. Important as they are, discussions of the ministry of the laity, the total people of God, are not substitutes for asking, if the minister is a servant, just what his unique service (and not privilege or status) is to be, and what competence does he have to carry it out. In this book I hope I may be nudging an ecumenical discussion or two to take function seriously, instead of making exhortations about diakonia and then discussing ministry in terms of status rather than function.

Some of the special emphases on the ministry today differ, however, from those of the past. Some of these positions flow from concern to minister to people in special situations or settings: the inner city, the hospital, military service, college campus, mission field, and others. It is argued (rightly I believe) that ministry in all such settings requires special knowledge and skills that may not be parts of the traditional preparation for the ministry, and that such education should at least be added to the traditional materials. Up to this point I agree. Some advocates, however, seem to believe that the new kinds of knowledge and skill make the old ones unnecessary. I strongly disagree. In the field I know best, hospital chaplaincy, the best chaplaincy work increasingly performs a wider, and not a narrower, range of the total functions of ministry. I see no reason why this is not relevant to ministry in the other special settings.

Another kind of position about the ministry, which now seems likely to be adopted to a certain extent by the Roman Catholic Church, is to create a group of subministers, who are permitted to perform nearly (but not quite) all the functions of the priest, but who will be trained much more quickly. This might turn out as successfully as has the relation of practical nurses to registered nurses. But the problem is far more difficult, and the parallel far from exact because all nurses work under the general direction of physicians. It is difficult for me to see what functions of professional ministry can be mastered without professional education. Very many functions of the church, under professional supervision, can be done by those not professionally trained. But again, the issue is: ordained ministry, or the office or offices of set-aside ministry.

A third kind of modern position about the ministry (and here there is a variety of views) relates to specialism. The number of persons exercising their ministry through concentration on special functions has greatly increased. In my own church it is now estimated that 20 percent of our ministers are specialists in this sense. Functional specialism may make for much more effective service. But is a functionally specializing minister protected from keeping his mind on anything except the area of his specialty? If he is a Christian educator, does he simply forget that, even for him, preaching and pastoral care are aspects of ministry from which he cannot disidentify himself even if his time spent on hem is less than if he were not a functional specialist? Although I am all for functional specialization in the interest of more adequate total ministry, I am entirely against any conception of specialized ministry that tries, thereby, to "protect" people from identification with ministry as a whole. I am even more against those who regard this or that functional specialty as having a special status of its own, whether they be seminary teachers or pastoral counselors.

Also involved in the arguments about specialized ministries today is how specialized workers in the employ of churches and church organizations, when they are not ordained ministers, shall be related to the churches. In the field of Protestant overseas missions, there are far more nonordained than ordained people. Business managers, social workers, and many others also work for the churches at home. In theory I would hold that, while it is excellent to have such workers, the general oversight should be by an ordained minister — who presumably takes into account all the kinds of needed functions that the Christian community should be performing. In actual fact this may not be good policy in specific instances. Some of the best pioneering contributions of the churches shade some functions and emphasize others. And one expert in the emphasized functions may there be the best general overseer. One of the challenges today is to retain intact the function of general supervision or oversight, in the name and for the sake of the totality of functions of the church, and yet to have some nonhierarchical way of using persons with the needed special knowledge in the work of the church — all over and above the voluntary service of every Christian. The more we can take and understand general oversight as function and not as status, the easier will be the solution to this problem.

In reminding myself as much as my readers of what seem to me principal highlights in the history of the ordained ministry, I have not hesitated to let my position in favor of monoepiscopacy — a general overseer and supervisor in each operative Christian community — be clear. But I have also tried to show that, in Christianity as in no other universal religion (with very minor exceptions), there has rarely been a question about this. There have been thousands of problems. In any local Christian community the minister, no matter what he was called, might interpret oversight as domination, as exuding charm and doing nothing, or in many other irritating or obstructive ways. But only under direst distress have such communities decided to have no overseer at all.

The great historic quarrels about ministry have been, so to speak, geographic. Is the local community its own final authority? Does the overseer of the area have the right to order thus and so of the local community? Or does some kind of representative assembly of a wider area take precedence over any one supervisor or any one community? Today each of these systems of polity (which means political systems) has been qualified, although there are still divisions among them. But there is increasing recognition that whatever their merit — and there may be a bit in each — they are not so much theories of the ministry as theories of ministerial geography. This book is devoted to ministry, not to ministerial geography.

The Ordained Ministry and Functional Competence

Even I, although I have argued throughout this chapter for understanding the ministry basically from a monoepiscopal point of view, have sometimes been nostalgic about the first century, where everybody seemed so keen and enthusiastic (literally filled with God) that things got done and "offices" were not established. But then I get second thoughts about Paul, who, with both his genius and his humility, was nevertheless going to fight all corners who said he was not a true apostle — even though he did not meet the formal apostolic criterion of having known Jesus in his earthly ministry. Had I been in one of those Christian communities back there, I am sure I would have appreciated Paul’s visits and his letters to my local group. But I think I would have wondered how he put himself so completely above the political battle. When we reach the postapostolic age, we find, happily, the emergence of the monoepiscopal conception of the ministry, according to which somebody around the place has to keep his eye on whatever is cooking.

There is only one alternative to having a general overseer or supervisor to any kind of local group, church or otherwise, provided there is to be some continuity and performance of functions. That is to have so many codes, rules, regulations, and rituals that everybody involved knows exactly what he is to do — and is of course, therefore, likely to do no more. The Christian church of the early second century lived in this world, and knew that an "organic" body of Christ demanded some kind of organizing. As all subsequent history, including the Protestant Reformation, shows, however, general overseers are likely to stress their status and power and diminish their functions as service. Even though we are more democratic about it all than previous ages, we are far from immune to the same tendency. Thus, if a minister today is not in process of being ousted, is regarded by at least many of his people as a wonderful Christian, a helpful preacher, a diligent pastor, and so on, he may rest content in this kind of status even though privately he is disturbed at all the kids who drop out of church school, at the inattentiveness of the church to its neighborhood, at the virtual neglect of older people, and at the bourgeois aroma that infects everything. I have met a very few ministers who are relatively unprincipled politicians, but very few indeed. The overwhelming majority fall back into a status not because it has power but rather because they want to be "settled." Today, I think, too many ministers settle for too little power. Some kind of power is needed if service is to be performed. This ought not to be "power over," in the sense of overriding anybody without consulting him seriously. But the retreat to "just doing my job" violates the whole conception of ministry, from the first and the second centuries alike.

With some exceptions, although they are decreasing, the ordained minister today of any Catholic or Protestant church except the fringe groups has had a college or university education, and then an education in a theological school or seminary. Beyond his arts course he has studied an incredible variety of subjects. There is usually both the Greek and Hebrew languages, so he can read the Bible in its original tongues. There is biblical history, theology, archaeology, "criticism," and hermeneutics (what happens to the Bible at the modern end of the sausage grinder). He has studied the history of the Church and churches, and hopefully also a bit about the history of religions other than Judaism and Christianity. He has done systematic theology, historical theology, the philosophy of religion, and maybe even the sociology and the psychology of religion. He has studied preaching, corrected his speech, delved into religious education, and had a go at pastoral care. He has worked on ethics and ecumenic and the "secular society." Maybe — but it is doubtful — he has had some study of how to be an overseer, which is to be the focus of his job from here on no matter what its setting. He has been exhorted to keep on reading, not only "theology" (and what a mixture he has already got) but also novels, history, biography, and every contemporary journal that can get him into the mind of society and the problems of the world.

All this is great; but if his head is spinning — well, why shouldn’t it? And nobody knows better than the intelligent minister of today that, whatever he has been able to devour of all this, he has not "mastered" anything. to say nothing of the whole of it.

I admire the modern minister’s realism and humility. But mostly I don’t like what he does with them. He tends to use them as barricades. In a strange way, and one unjustified by the actual knowledge he has and the skills he rapidly acquires, he tends to become defensive in a professional sense. By running down his own abilities, he unintentionally runs down the ministry. Then along comes some article about "Why I Left the Ministry," or "More Christianity and Fewer Churches," or "The Creative Ministry Without Local Churches," or "Ministers Don’t Know Why They Are" — and the poor fellow buckles. Nonsense! No professional man today, even the doctor, has "mastered" his field. Knowledge is expanding too rapidly for that. A great number of ministers are catching on to whatever is valid new knowledge. Some others are throwing in the sponge. But the fact is that nobody can master it all. Perfectionism will not do. The attitude is more important than the achievement.

Happily, continuing education opportunities for ministers are increasing by leaps and bounds, even though far too many of them still are more hortatory and "hand-holding" than they should be. And most of them are too short. In my judgment, a good continuing education course for the minister should begin where the minister has his problems; that is, with an issue of function, of service, of how you do this or that, and then go back to basic principles, wherever you can find them, to shed light on whatever it is. Far too many courses of continuing education insult the minister, even if he does not realize it, by refusing to organize the material in this way. They insist that he take a look at, let us say, Old Testament theology, or pastoral counseling, in their own categories — instead of asking first the functional questions of both Old Testament theology and pastoral counseling.

Perhaps the sessions themselves are good. But if the minister leaves with nothing but a sense of what he does not know, then something is wrong. He is not, after all, trying to become a research expert in special theological disciplines. Can he be helped within his knowledge, but utilizing every swotch of it, to use it more effectively in his ministry? That is the question that should be posed to all programs of continuing education. Most of them, in reply, I believe, are not so good. They may do an excellent job on content of this area or that. But when anybody asks "How?" they tend to fade into the distance. Why should not such a program be able, with illustrations, to speak to "How"? Please, brother minister, do not let the august leader off the hook at this point. If he doesn’t know how then he does not know his subject. No formulas. But "hows" are more than formulas. Stand up for your rights.

Conclusion

I have written this chapter under the internal duress of respect for the communicative process. My discussion of the ministry which follows is about the functions of ministry. So far as I can see, in any proper kind of logical sense, functions are what follow from diakonia. In my judgment, every minister is at all times sufficiently sensitive to all these functions as appropriate to ministry that, according to the situation, he responds with a dominant emphasis on this function or that. If he has been smart enough to enlist other people to perform many functions of the total diakonia within the church and to the world, that is commendable. But he is still, regardless of the setting of his ministry, responsible for appraising what is going on, stimulating more where needed, and encouraging the changing of forms and patterns when the old have outlived their usefulness.

Not only do I believe in the monoepiscopal ministry. I see this conception as also unique, structurally, to Christianity. It has many temptations, all of which have been fallen for in the history of the church. It can become power over, or detachment, or authoritarianism, or busy-work, or much else, in its pathologies. But you cannot have a competent and moving local Christian community without a supervisor, an overseer, who, while dependent upon his community, is nevertheless free at critical points to transcend it. He must be with his organization, but he cannot be merely an organization man.

In the chapters that follow, my implicit argument all the way through is that a lot of the modem arguments about the ministry can be solved if they are approached through the analysis of functions of ministry. No automatic harmony guaranteed. But try it on for size.

By analogy "ferment" means stir, agitation, unrest, commotion, excitement, or tumult. But the original context from which this metaphor comes, wine-making, includes such characteristics as only intermediate phases of a process whose aim is a stronger product. There is a kairos to wine-making. If fermentation goes on indefinitely, the product is useless. If the proper moment of arrest is seized, however, then the intermediate stirrings and agitations may be seen as necessary stages in the making of a better product.

I believe that "ferment" is a better description of what is happening in the ministry today than are such other terms as "crisis," "maceration," "breakdown," or "upset." Crisis means a point of compelled decision. It implies red and green lights, whereas in fact there is also an amber light that can mean anything from muddling through to new hope. Maceration means softening. It implies a kind of errand-boy failure of nerve, whereas in fact there is probably as much courage in the ministry today as at any time in Christian history. Breakdown means the machinery has failed. It implies that nothing is being done. The fact is, however, that whatever may not be running, it is not the machinery. Upset means being stood on the head. It implies disproportion, misdirection, and even a feeling of tipsiness. In fact, however, most ministers are more puzzled than tipsy. I prefer ferment, with its two clear implications: first, that the stage of agitation may be both necessary and anxiety-inducing; and second, that the result may be very good if the commotion is stopped in time.

The time has come, I think, to move beyond the guerrilla-warfare criticisms of the ministry that have been plentiful in the past ten years. The ferment that they have both expressed and induced may be a very good thing. Such benefits should not be lost. An attempt to return to older certainties will not do. But we should be able to take this particular vintage out of the vats — even if we use a new supply of grapes to start some new fermentation.

The central constructive thesis of this book is that analysis of the functions of ministry (through the idea of images) shows the ministry to be, both psychologically and theologically, a unity — although a complex unity with a variety of types of activity. If the minister grasps this sense of unity within complexity, then he need not feel pulled in sixteen directions. He must still make decisions, hard decisions, about the investment of his time and energy. And he must still be sensitive to the idiosyncrasies in his particular situation. But he will not feel that his job is impossible, or inherently frustrating, or nothing but anxiety. This thesis will be spelled out in many ways throughout the chapters that follow.

The "gimmick" used throughout the discussion is the image, by which is meant a cartoon-like picture that selects central points in the foreground and neglects photographic-like detail that could detract from the needed impression. A large jaw and a cigarette holder could stand, in cartoons, for Franklin D. Roosevelt. A cigar in a determined profile represented Winston Churchill. I believe that, in this cartoon-like sense, the human mind carries out much of its work of perceiving. The trick comes in whether what is selected really is what is most important or not.

The notion of image is not used here in some senses that are, in other contexts, legitimate. It is not used as a mirror-like reflection. Nor is it used as a die-stamp. Nor as a replica. It is not used either as in some modem psychology, as a "self-image," meaning the total view one has of himself. It is used, instead, as an attempt to objectify, with cartoon-like pictures, the inner conception of function, i.e., what one is trying to accomplish. Beginning in Chapter 3, the reader will be carried into the details of my image-clutching.

Since I believe that my complex unity of the ministry thesis, argued out through analysis of images of function, has a chance of getting the wine out of the vats before fermentation has gone on too long, I intend in this volume a message both of hope and challenge for the ministry. That this is a measured conviction, and not hortatory or sentimental wishfulness, I shall try to demonstrate in the present chapter by a brief discussion of the current negative charges against the ministry. None of these charges is without a modicum of truth. But they are all one-sided, and neglectful of the renewal that is going on through the ferment.

Ministers Are Leaving?

The charge is that so many more priests and ministers are leaving the ministry than at any previous time that the ministry must be an impossible vocation. So far, reliable general statistics are not available. But it is probably true that the proportionate number of persons leaving the ministry in recent years is in fact higher than at any time in our century. The actual number, however, is still proportionately small, despite scare stories in the press.

How many of these demittings, however, represent either failure of ministry or failure of man, and how many represent some advance on the part of the persons involved? A few are, perhaps, failures. The majority, I am convinced, are quite otherwise.

I think of two ministers who left the ministry, with whom I have counseled at some length in recent years. Needless to say, my brief accounts of them are designed to conceal all identifying information while also presenting the essence of their respective situations. Minister A was brilliant and had great potential as a theologian. But in a personality sense he was brittle. He was minister of a conservative denomination which had impeded him, throughout his theological studies, from actively relating theology to life and the world. Suddenly he got a new vision about theology, that it was most precisely related to life and the world. He felt released. For the first time, his own faith related to his life. Had he been more of a leader, and less brittle, he might well have returned to his denomination and been a leader in its movement ahead. But some things are irreversible. In a curious way, his leaving the ministry restores his Christian faith personally. I feel certain that God has called him to what he is now doing, which is a kind of secular ministry. He demitted the ministry. But what he is now doing is more for God, and himself, than if he had remained in the ordained ministry.

Minister B was a live-wire social reformer, not exactly hotheaded but certainly precipitate. He was in no sense thrown out of his local church, and indeed continued to be greatly respected by most of his people. But he grew impatient in dealing with the socially conservative minority who objected to his forays into the problems of the world. If he had had more "tension capacity," he would have realized that he could proceed along the lines of his intention, winning some converts and remaining in tension with others, but without jeopardy to his program. Psychologically, however, he was not inwardly strong enough to sustain this tension. Had he continued in the ministry, he might well have broken under it. With his many talents he had no difficulty getting a job with an excellent secular agency; and so far he has done well. Someday he may of course face partial disillusionment in his present work. There are bound to be ups and downs. In a curious sense, despite his single-minded devotion to social reform, his character was too dependent to manage this through the ordained ministry. He needed fewer ambiguities. For the moment at least, he is in such a situation, and I am sure the Lord approves.

Even though Protestants have held, from the Reformation, that every Christian has a "calling" from God, and that ministers are no better in God’s eyes than any others, a curious Protestant cloud has looked upon leaving the ordained ministry as something like adultery or divorce. Perhaps it is true that, with some new freedom in this area, some precipitate decisions to leave the ministry or priesthood have been made without adequate exploration of the factors involved. But the freedom itself is good, even if on occasion it may be abused. The new climate requires that the churches, separately or together, provide "vocational counseling" service for ministers of a kind that the past has not known. Some real experiments in this direction are under way, as in my own Presbyterian Church. With some few ministers, we rejoice when they have the guts to leave the ministry. Past ages would have given them no choice, and they would have had to continue in chains to no good of themselves or of the church.

Ministers Are Breaking Down?

There are times when I wish more ministers were breaking down — with heart disease, blood pressure, cancer, psychoses, or criminal impulses. If they did, it might show that they were unhappy victims of commitment to their difficult and complex jobs. The fact is, however, that ministers are the most long-lived of all professional men, and their incidence of serious mental illness is low.

The Board of Pensions of my own church, the United Presbyterian, entered into a relationship with the Menninger Foundation some four or five years ago according to which any minister or his wife or minor children might go to Kansas for a psychiatric evaluation lasting one to two weeks, with most of the bill paid by the Board. No details need be given to the Board; and once the evaluation is completed, the Foundation reports only to the persons involved. Thus privacy is fully respected.

For the period immediately following the initiation of the plan, a number of ministers (together with wives and children) took advantage of the opportunity and were demonstrated to have real mental or emotional problems. In all instances sound counsel was given about steps from that point onward. But after the early rush a new kind of fact came to light. Ministers appeared who, after investigation, proved to be no more mentally ill than other people, but who really hoped that the psychiatrists could call them such — because then the relational problems in the church, or in the family, would not have to be taken as their own responsibility. One could almost say that unconsciously they wanted to be regarded as "sick."

This situation of course points to a relative lack of proper vocational counseling services within the United Presbyterian Church, which we are in process of amending. But from a "breakdown" point of view, the curious fact is that many of these men who were not broken down at all would have, however unconsciously, welcomed a "breakdown" diagnosis.

Since ministers and priests are as human as other people, a certain proportion are bound to have mental and physical ills, in all degrees, regardless of their dedication to their faith and their work. The astonishing fact is how seldom these ills become really serious. When they do, then expert help is needed. Roman Catholics are realistically operating some special treatment programs for priests who become alcoholic or otherwise mentally ill. In the sense of the Presbyterian-Menninger program, Protestants have begun on the same kind of needed and realistic course. Ordination is not a guarantee of continuing mental health. And many excellent persons can be saved by proper programs. Even severe mental illness need not be permanent.

Overall, the "breakdown" theory of the ministry has very few legs to stand on.

The Local Church Is Dead?

Let ministers get into the inner city — in store-front churches, neighborhood gangs, health centers, drug-addict operations, and many other places — and there the church is truly at work. Or let them go into a corner of the globe where there is need, forget the faith temporarily except as a motivator, empathize with the needs of the people, and help the people do whatever is needed to better their condition and obtain more justice. Or let them go, militantly, into any place where they can minister without risk of contamination from existing ecclesiastical structures. We do need ministers in all such spots. What they do may be enormously important. Such sites are the modern equivalent — no matter what the geography — of the foreign missionary movement of the previous century.

The fact is, however, that just like the previous century’s overseas missionary movement, none of this is possible if there are not "home churches" to support it. What can we make, then, of those who want to kill the duck that shells out the silver eggs? Why the extreme antipathy, on the part of a few ministers and seminarians, to the "local church"?

I have no new wisdom on this problem, and it is indeed a serious current problem. I am impressed, however, that at my own seminary the best attitude-changer in this regard is actual experience, under competent supervision, in some kind of church situation. It makes no difference whether the theological student is in a local church (and no matter what kind), an inner-city situation, or a hospital. If he is competently supervised, and thus enabled and forced to learn of ministry from reflection on his actual experience, then he becomes positive — although also properly critical — of the ministry of the local church. If, on the other hand, he manages to evade such supervised experience, or has the bad luck to land a situation with poor supervision, then he goes on arraigning the local church.

In connection with our Princeton field education program, we have two suburban local churches where the senior ministers are unusually competent supervisors, owing to both training and natural gifts. Each of them takes a group of three or four students (part-time, of course). The students stick out their respective necks, do what they can in programs assigned to them, and then have the same kind of supervision and feedback that they would have in a clinical pastoral education program. Every one of these students has become enthusiastic about the local church! Part of the reason is surely the competence of the supervision, the selection of graded activities for the students to assume responsibility for, and the acceptance of the students as genuine working sub-ministers. But not a little of it is due also to their being in a group where they can, as peers, exchange all kinds of gripes and praises and critiques among themselves, with or without their minister-supervisor around. They learn leadership through participation. The usual field-work situation of one student provides no such opportunity.

Under the leadership of the late Dean Samuel H. Miller, the Harvard University Divinity School has for some years past invited some minister of a local church to the campus for an intensive couple of days with the students. There have been well-known ministers, and others never heard of by Time and Life. How many conversions from teaching to the local church have been made I do not know. But the idea and the program are excellent. What is going on in our local churches — with all its obscurity and ambiguity — is the future of the church, for good or for ill. And, in my judgment, not so ill. My guess is, nevertheless, that any of the ministers invited to Harvard have had long thoughts both fore and aft. They could not say no, anymore than one can to the White House. But what kind of weak ethos was Sam Miller getting them to shore up? They must, in fact, have done very well; for to my astonishment I have heard that a few Harvard Divinity graduates have actually gone into local churches.

I know there are local churches that regard their minister as a hired man, others that regard him as a functionary to be dealt with today but happily gone elsewhere next year, and even some that get his political voting record and his children’s marks in school before they issue a call. Not all of this caution, incidentally, is bad. Its exercise, since no perfect minister ever shows up, thank God, may lead the church members and leadership into the realization that they too have some responsibility. They cannot ask that the Rev. George do it all. In the interim, however, unless the Rev. George has guts, the fermentation may include some sour apples.

A minority of theological students, when confronted with the complexities of any local church in any site, will want to retreat to something simpler like nuclear physics, where there is some semblance of predictability on the part of neutrons, protons, electrons, and mesons, in contrast to the complexities of both people and church organizations. Supervision may make a decisive difference. Even so, some will find they cannot stand the ambiguity. If so, wonderful that the truth has been discovered so early. The vast majority, however, especially under competent supervision, if they have got this far will go farther.

A minister who cannot tolerate ambiguity cannot tolerate a local church. In many respects, as we now know, the capacity to tolerate ambiguity is a kind of final mark of mental health. One may be low on it and still mentally healthy if the external situation can be arranged to make it unnecessary. But for all complex services and positions, this capacity may make the difference between success and failure. If a minister has very little such capacity, then that is the situation; and the Lord will obviously want him working elsewhere than in a local church. But the capacity, if it exists at all, may be developed. He may "feel ferment," while in actual fact this may be productive adaptation.

Laymen Are the Real Ministers?

Through its pronouncements and its collective actions, the church does some affecting of the ills of society. But what is done to this end through church members, in their various slots of social responsibility, is undoubtedly more significant. The responsible J. B. Somebody, who lives in the suburb of Skewed Gardens, a paradise unknown to the poor of Central City, may nevertheless be the chairman of the Improvement Committee of Central City — and mostly because his church has given him some faith and conscience. Maybe the proletariat, Negro or otherwise, will some day skew his gardens in the suburbs. But their chances are much better to get to him and, if necessary, get him to take a more radical line to help them.

Unless I am mostly blind, I see far more responsible and widespread participation of laymen in the churches of the United States than in Europe and the British Commonwealth. Here, our churches have had to support themselves almost from the beginning. The minister has never been able to retreat to a position disclaiming concern for finances. This is in contrast to churches which, at least in the past, were supported by taxation, and where the minister could "forget money." On Stewardship Sunday, of course, this fact can make us look like Madison Avenue if it is badly done. But I think more German churches would have education rooms and kitchens if they had ever had to fend for themselves except during the Hitler regime.

There can be no possible question that the influence of the church upon the ills and evils of the world is carried out through laymen — or not at all. The unhappy aspect about the present ordained breast-beating is that this point is used, surreptitiously, as if it let ordained ministers off the hook about "supervising" what is going on in the impact of the church upon the world. Supervision is not bossing. It is not directing in the sense of giving orders. It is supporting attentiveness, not devoid of criticism, but fundamentally encouraging. Quite literally in heaven’s name, why pit ministers against laymen? Why not give each his job description — which was once referred to as his "vocation"? We have had romantics about the ministry before, and we have them now. Once we had Baptist farmer-preachers, who preached on Sunday and farmed during the week. Once we had Methodist "itinerants," like Peter Cartwright, who traveled from place to place on horseback and made a point of never settling. If you settled, or made your "living" from ministry, you were suspect. While respecting the motivations of such men, we can see today, nonetheless, the romantic underpinnings of these attitudes. The minister must face the world in all its ambiguity, including his income from the church, and do what he can.

Latterly, both John A. T. Robinson and James A. Pike have been advocating a ministry that earns its living somewhere else and works for the church on its "nonreimbursed time." If some ministers can manage this feat, God bless them. But as a general pattern this seems to me a product of romanticism, taking with insufficient seriousness the "materialism of Christianity," as William Temple called it, and quite likely to produce the wrong kind of guilt feelings in competent young people who are in or who are considering the ministry — as if this activity were not worthy of economic support.

I hope that our local churches will become livelier places than many of them now are, no matter where they are located. Could "The Church" survive without them? By having the courage to close out all local churches that are moribund, unneeded, unduly competitive, and so on, the Church could help to protect the meaning and significance and program of "the local church." But close them out indiscriminately? What nonsense!

No appropriate ministry of the laity can conceivably be in fundamental opposition to the ordained ministry, unless there is a screw loose on either side of the board.

The Church Is the Establishment?

How do we look at the "Establishment" history? Is it the left-wing Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, George Fox, Martin Luther King, Jr., Eugene Carson Blake, and others? Or is it the Spanish Inquisition, the anti-Bonhoeffer German Christians, the John Birch Christians, and others? When is the Church part of the Establishment, and when is it a liberal critic going beyond what exists? Every student of church history must give his own verdict. As for mine, with all the reaction that has often been in evidence, I see the basic action of the churches as against reaction and for progress.

The current critique charges the Church and the churches with being part of the Establishment, white, middle-class, tax-free, economically secure, insensitive to the needs of minorities, smug in wealth, sot in structures, bureaucratic in organization. Who, in honesty, could deny a certain amount of truth in all such charges?

At root, however, this charge is not much above the level of the hippies. It implies a first-century romantic bias against the second-century need to find secretaries and treasurers and chairmen — without a St. Paul to appeal to! Specific criticisms of what the denominations are doing, individually or collectively, must always be in order. But the assumption that what they are always up to is reaction and holding the line is clearly unwarranted. I am all for specific criticisms of the churches and what they are or are not doing. But global negation of the church as "Establishment"? Nonsense! Nothing can have influence if it has no kind of "establishment" beyond its "first century."

Most seminary students are still in process of winning psychological freedom from their parents or guardians. Talk in the air about the "Establishment" may, depending on the individual student, either provide him with an excuse for not breaking the dependent ties or enable him to find a respectable intermediary object. When I talk with a student, I try to be alert to how much of one and how much of the other is involved. In a way, the same criterion holds for young ordained ministers. If they have no criticism of the status quo, probably ecclesiastical rigor mortis has set in. But in that case, I probably do not see them. They come back to Princeton only when they have a problem and a hope. The question, then, is whether their view of their ministerial problem is open to what they can do, and they are not mainly interested in getting excused from what they cannot do.

The Establishment — any Establishment — is always full of holes. Anybody with a brain and a conscience must be discriminatingly critical of every Establishment. But global rejections — as if the world should have no establishments of any kind? Nonsense!

Isolation from the World?

Next Sunday, in the First Church of Nixie, New York, or the Saint Waldemar’s Church of Proxie, Alabama, I am sure the respective ministers will declare that love is a wonderful thing, that Jesus agreed with their opinions; so why doesn’t everybody get on the bandwagon and love one another — taking it easy, of course, with Negroes, minority groups, homosexual persons, criminals, the mentally ill, and many others? Love them of course, but not too fondly!

How much is the church isolated from the world — both the social problems like race and poverty and the psychological realities like hostility and aggression? The answer to both segments of the question, unhappily, is: Still a good deal — but rapidly decreasing. On the first segment we still have many churches trying to do business as usual, as if they could forget the tough situations and let the government or somebody take care of it. Where this is the attitude, usually the people involved are those who most resent it when the government or somebody does in fact try to do something about it. In my judgment, while these groups and churches are real, they are a minority. The much more frequent situation involves the church that does want to do something about it but does not know how its slender resources can make a legible contribution.

There are two aspects of this church and world business, viewed contemporaneously and functionally. On the one side, it is possible for the church to let the rest of the world go by — and for the minister to concern himself mainly with his pulpit robe equipment, the shape of the baptistry, the architecture of the sanctuary, and perhaps the related facilities such as the educational rooms and the kitchens. All these things are good in themselves if set in proper perspective. On the other side, it is equally possible for the church to become so "worldly" that sermons become trash, worship becomes an outdated rite, and the church becomes so "relevant" as to have nothing to contribute once it gets there.

I still feel profoundly disturbed by the story of the able Lutheran minister in the Midwest who fought through, over a year or more, the necessity of his church to involve itself fully in the problems of the Negroes of the community and environs. He did a great job. But when the one kind of victory — compromise — that a Christian can count on was in sight, he resigned. Of this resignation I remain critical. Did he not know that we live in this world and not in an ideal world? If he had had no courage, we could wipe him off. But he had! Nevertheless, he apparently had a perfectionism that wanted to deal with the world all at once or not at all.

In this country above all others, whatever the defects of the Church and churches, they are not isolated from the world. Consult your pastor about a problem of marriage or neurosis or delinquency, and hardly any minister will demand that you get it set in "religious" categories before he tries to help you. Since I believe there are always religious and theological dimensions of any such problem, I am not at this point advocating a sterile secularism. But the point is: No conditions — come as you are! When I see some modern miniskirts and slacks, I am tempted to qualify this principle. But so long as decency is preserved, I stand by it. In contrast to my days of youth and vigor, I now have more trouble with the late-middle-aged woman who ought to know better than to wear slacks than I do with the beautiful young thing who fills them admirably. I get along better when I am tempted.

Anyhow, this charge about the isolation of the church from the world cuts both ways. It contains truth in many instances. But the answer to it can never be just caving in, either by retreating into itself or by forgetting its uniqueness.

Should the Church Care — or Fight?

Pastoral care or social action? If the church helps someone to adapt to his situation, is it guilty of depriving him of motivation for standing up against the status quo? If the church, on the other hand, leads him to believe that social action will solve his problems, is it concealing from him the psychological ambiguity he must face in order to live in this ambiguous world?

When should the church care and when should it fight? The one possible general answer is: according to the nature of particular situations. Thus, the harm comes whenever a penchant for one at the expense of the other takes over altogether.

My own professional career began near the start of the modern pastoral care movement. In the early days we were regarded as radical. The seminaries and denominations gave us little attention or help. By the 1960’s, however, this movement had won respectability so thoroughly that it is sometimes regarded by the current crop of social action leaders as simply part of the Establishment.

Ever since the beginning of the social gospel movement early in this century, the churches have been seriously engaged in social action. But it seems probable that the pace of this was slowed down for a number of years by some of the so-called neo-orthodox trends in theology. The 1960’s have certainly witnessed more fighting activity on the part of churches and ministers.

What I seem now to detect, most noticeably on seminary campuses, is a new, largely unconscious, and rather dangerous notion about what is masculine and virile and worthy in ministry — as against what is held to be feminine, weak, hand-holding, playing into the status quo. The ultimate question I have been asked is, "What do you want us to do, hold old ladies’ hands?" And my answer is, of course, "Under some conditions, that is an essential part of the ministry; and besides, old ladies are safer than young ones."

Since the exercise of ministry involves both caring and fighting, according to the situation, the minister who is acutely uncomfortable with either will have a tough time of it. Perhaps each of us tends to lean a bit toward one side or the other; but we can shore up our weak side. The damage comes only when one or the other is renounced.

Theology for Ministry?

It has been charged that finding a viable theology for ministry has become a virtually impossible task. Most pulpit theology, it is held, has never even caught up to neo-orthodoxy, is suspicious alike of John A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God and Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics, and simply says a flat No to the recent radical theologies without understanding the problem they are trying, however ineffectively, to solve.

On the other side, the charge is made by many ministers that today’s theologians are giving them little help. They tend to write and speak to one another rather than to ministers and church members, it is contended. Even though the issues with which they are dealing are no doubt important, why, it is asked, can they not put their thoughts so as to provide theological help for the minister?

I suspect there is some real truth in both charges. Ever since the frontier began moving westward in this country, there has been a lot of anti-intellectualism in the ministry. And it is clear that in recent years professional theologians (mostly professors) have become far more of a guild than ever before. These are long-term trends that shall require increasing attention and some appropriate correction.

In my judgment, however, it is much more possible for a minister today to find and build a theology for ministry than it has been at any time in my professional career. What has happened is that many of the old taboos or caveats, often unspoken, have either disappeared or been sharply reduced in force. Thus, the minister is freer than he has ever been to build and use a theology that truly makes sense to him. Perhaps the difference is that today he is obligated to work this out himself no matter how many aids he uses. He cannot now merely rely on something given and objective as wholly constituting his theology, as if the Bible or the creeds or the prayer book or Karl Barth or Paul Tillich or Martin Luther were all the theology he needed.

In a way, then, the theological crisis of the ministry is methodological in character. Authorities are still needed; but the authority question is no longer a simple matter of which one. Whatever the authority or authorities looked to, they are insufficient in building a full theology for ministry. One’s own part in the task, with all the risks entailed, is now inescapable. This kind of ferment is long overdue. And if we do not move toward iconoclastic radicalism on the one side, or retreat to positive-thinking theology on the other, the interim period will have been worth it.

From Ferment to Function

With the completion of this chapter, and except for side discussions here and there, this book is finished with the prevailing negative charges against the ministry. In speaking to them in such brief compass, I am sure I shall not have answered all the questions of all readers about them. None of the charges, I have tried to suggest, is without foundation. Yet any of them, pushed beyond a certain point, tends to falsify the situation of the ministry today.

I like the metaphor of "fermentation" for the situation of the ministry today. It has been and still is in a stage of agitation. But if we can arrest this particular vat in time, we can get from it an excellent product. The fact that new vats, as always, will soon be needed does not make less important the fact that we had best soon turn this one off.

Beginning about ten years ago and lasting through the present, we have had a new kind and volume of criticism of the ministry and the situation in which it finds itself today. Even on a second look, none of these books and articles is without validity and merit. It was charged that the ministry had been softened, that ministers were breaking down, that ministers were getting out, that the job description was impossible, that the ministry was a slave of the Establishment, and so on.

These critiques began in the Eisenhower era, and reached their peak in the brief Kennedy period. Under both of these regimes things seemed secure. Pejorative criticism, even if it carried traces of positivisitic Philistinism, could still regard itself as having constructive intent — because, overall, all seemed well. In good times, prophecy about the stench may very well regard itself as constructive.

All this was, however, before our serious involvement in Vietnam, before the race riots in our cities, before the two Kennedy and one King assassinations, and before the incredible fact of the nation’s increasing wealth and yet the horrible poverty of many of our citizens had become clear to the public.

This is neither a political nor an economic book, and I have no solutions to suggest for either the nation’s wealth or its poverty. But I hope I do have something to say about priests and ministers as we work in this complex situation. We have been going through a period of "failure of nerve," to use the phrase applied originally by Gilbert Murray to Hellenistic civilization. We have become conditioned to listen, Pavlov-fashion, to every conceivable critique of the ministry (and of course of the church as well). Unlike the men who handle jets on our airports, we have had no earplugs that could enable us to separate the sheer noise and push from the genuine problems. Consequently, we have become inclined to listen to the worst we could hear; and, while never taking it wholly, we regard it as a mark of Christian repentance to meditate on the charges as a theological work of merit. Most of us have got on with our jobs of ministry, but with a kind of unexamined uneasiness that does neither God, the church, the world, nor ourselves any good.

For myself, I am through with this well-intentioned but misdirected kind of oblique repentance. Whatever its faults, the ministry in virtually all our churches is more able, better educated, more sensitive to the actual situations of need, and better informed about its tradition, than ever before. It is also, as I shall analyze in the first chapter of this book, in "ferment." But ferment is a stage in the process of wine-making which, while full of agitation and bubbles, comes out at a constructive point if it is not taken as a finality.

I believe I am offering some kind of solution to this failure of nerve in the ministry. My thesis is that the ministry is a unity, a complex unity to be sure, but a unity nevertheless. A complex unity implies some ambiguity, at least temporarily. Therefore, the practical solution to the present failure of nerve comes with a better understanding of the complex unity of the ministry, and capacity to confront the ambiguity of the complexity without losing sight of the unity. I shall argue this thesis during most of the book through cartoon-like images of the actual functions of ministry, attempting to demonstrate that, although details of function differ, they are attitudinally coherent and integrated.

There are new forms and settings of ministry, and new challenges. I trust that my discussion will give them due attention. But to whatever group of general or particular need, and in whatever setting, and no matter who pays the bill, the ministry is finally a general (or "monoepiscopal," to use the scholar’s phrase) leadership of any Christian community that is trying to do something significant. New forms of ministry are peculiarly needed in our own day. But if their practitioners have to denigrate all other forms of ministry in order to defend their own, then there is a psychological screw loose somewhere.

This book has been in preparation for almost ten years. In 1958, when I was at the Chicago Theological Seminary and the Federated Theological Faculty of the University of Chicago, the director of the mid-winter conference for ministers twitted me into discussing the ministry today. Thus began the notes from which this discussion evolved. My next excursion into the material was at the summer ministers’ conference at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1960. Then at Brite Divinity School of Texas Christian University in 1961, and at the annual conference of the United Church of Canada on evangelism in 1962. Through these "tryouts" I had only notes.

My first on-paper chapters were for the Cole Lectures at Vanderbilt University in 1964, where four of the chapters were presented in substantially their present form. All the remaining chapters were written in 1967 and 1968, and none of them has been presented in lecture form. I am indebted to my doctoral seminar at Princeton Theological Seminary during the past year for helpful criticisms on the discipline chapter.

In writing a psychological analysis of the contemporary ministry during the past year for the Temporary Commission on Continuing Education of the United Presbyterian Church, which will make its report to the General Assembly in May of 1969, 1 drew upon the work I had done for this book, but there are no identities of text. In lecturing this past spring at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, I also drew upon these materials, but also with no identity of text.

My fundamental presentation of a theory of the ministry was made in my book Preface to Pastoral Theology (1958). There the theoretical apparatus and reasons for it are obtrusive. In the present volume I am rather more like a pamphleteer. I think the ministry is in much better shape than most of its critics allege. I am trying, although hopefully with some objectivity, to argue this thesis throughout. Hence I have even dispensed with references because I want nothing at all to interfere with my deeply felt conviction that the ministry can make it with a bit of understanding here and there. As any reader of my previous books knows, I must be worked up to dispense with references.

Because of the piecemeal way in which this book has been put together, I have never had a whole copy I could lend to anybody; hence I cannot thank anyone for reading the whole thing except the readers of the book itself. But I do want to thank, and warmly, the folks at Vanderbilt, Brite, Union, Chicago, Toronto, and Indianapolis for their responses to the aspects of this material that they heard.

I want, finally, to put in a word of appreciation to my Princeton colleague W. J. Beeners, the sole Princeton faculty member who is a better carpenter than I am. When I discovered that, with all its projections into the technological future of civilization, the great IBM Corporation did not make a case that would enable me to take my typewriter to Maine to finish this book, I appealed to Professor Beeners. Between us, we are ahead of IBM; for the typewriter has both gone and returned in perfect safety.

SEWARD HILTNER