The Meanings of Ministry
Sermon by Steve Edington
November 8, 2009
It's been many years now, but the date is still well fixed in my mind: June 6, 1971. On that day I was ordained to the ministry of the American Baptist Churches - USA, by a large, suburban, and liberally oriented American Baptist Church in Rochester, New York. (There really are liberally oriented American Baptist Churches, I should point out.) I was still a few months shy of my 26th birthday; and if I were to see myself as I looked then walking down a street, or perhaps sitting in this room right now, I'm not sure that I'd even recognize me.
A couple of weeks earlier I'd graduated from theological school with a Master of Divinity degree. The great majority of my fellow graduates were my age, give or take a year or two, and we were overwhelmingly male. We did not know at the time that we were a soon-to-be disappearing demographic when it came to those preparing for the ministry in mainline Protestant seminaries; well, not really disappearing, but certainly soon to no longer be the norm. As I recall there was one woman in our graduating class, who had decided to pursue a career in the ministry when she reached her mid-forties. Her name was Margery Matthews. She later became the first female Bishop in the United Methodist Church.
Within a dozen or so years of my graduation, however, the ratio of men and women preparing for the ministry in mainline Protestant seminaries - including the Unitarian Universalist ones - would become more or less even. And there would be an increasing preponderance of students in these same type seminaries who would be pursuing the ministry as a second career.
My classmates and I prepared for the ministry during an especially tumultuous time in our country's history. The Vietnam War continued to rage. Fathers Dan and Phil Berrigan - Dan a Jesuit Priest and Phil a Dominican Priest - were going to jail for their anti-war activities. The civil rights movement had evolved into the call for Black Power. We had witnessed the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. One of my fellow students was a member of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. This was the church Rev. King had served before taking on the mantle as leader of the civil rights movement. Such was the historical and cultural backdrop as my fellow graduates and I entered the ministry.
Times change. The historical backdrop changes. The nature of the student body in seminaries change. And the ministry still goes on; as congregations in the free Protestant tradition continue the practice of ordaining one of their own to the ministry - as we will do later today. On this Sunday the "main event service," the Ordination of Bruce Taylor, will take place this afternoon. I'm kind of "opening act" for the main event today. I figured the way to do that would be to offer a sermon on the meanings of ministry. My hope is that it will better help us understand why we, in this faith tradition of ours, do ministry in the manner in which we do. So, you're going to get a little history today, along with some of my own thoughts on what ministry means in a UU congregation like ours - both to the minister and the laity alike.
Let's do the history stuff first. Many of the explanations as to why certain things are done the way they are in Protestant churches start with the Protestant Reformation. And while most Unitarian Universalists today would not identify themselves as Protestant Christians that is still where our historical roots lie. The Protestant Reformation, as most of you know, was just what its name implied, a "protest" against some of the ways in which the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century was exercising, and abusing, its authority. Most of these original protesters - including Martin Luther - did not, at first at any rate, intend to precipitate a full blown revolt or rebellion against Rome. much less start a new church. They just wanted some things fixed in the church to which they belonged and to which they still felt allegiance.
Like many movements of this kind, however, what began as an in-house argument came to take on a life of its own that became the Protestant Reformation. It was a life that came to include bloody wars in various parts of Europe before things got sorted out and more or less settled down again. And like many such movements, this one was not monolithic. It had its various factions. These factions were united in their opposition to 16th century Catholicism, but they were not at all on the same page when it came to how things should be after the revolution, both in terms of theology, and church governance.
It took a whole course in Reformation History - back in those aforementioned seminary days - for me to get any sense of how broad in scope this movement really was; and I'm certainly not about to re-present all of it today. Lucky for you, I've forgotten far more that I remember of that course. So, I'll just cut to the chase with the part that concerns us now.
One of those factions I just referred to was called the "free church wing." The freedom, in this case, was not the wide ranging freedom of belief we UUs now affirm, but freedom from the dictates and authority of any kind of ecclesiastical hierarchy beyond that of the congregation. Free congregations, to be sure, could, and did, come together to form denominations, but those denominations exist at the pleasure of, and are there to serve, their member congregations and not the other way around.
Among the bodies that grew out of this free-church wing were the Baptists, the Congregationalists, the Quakers, the Unitarians, and the Universalists. We're all leaves on the same historical branch; it's just that the Unitarians and the Universalists took a hard left turn - theologically speaking - over the past century or so. Be that as it may, in each of these denominations or associations all authority, when it comes to governance, lies with the congregation and not in a structure, or chain of command, beyond the congregation.
What this means when it comes to ministers and ministry, to narrow the focus even further, is that the act of Ordination is something done by the congregation itself, once a candidate for the ministry has requested it. Most of the free-church congregations, we here included, do look to a denominational or associational body to determine if the person requesting ordination has the proper credentials to be a minister. But it is not the denomination who makes the candidate the "Reverend" So-and-So. My Ordination, nearly 40 years ago, was done according to these very same principles, or "rules" if you will, as those that apply to Bruce today. It was a credentialing committee within my, then, American Baptist denomination who determined that I was qualified to be an American Baptist minister. But I was not the Reverend Steve Edington until a particular congregation said I was. They made it so.
Several weeks ago, our Association's credentialing committee determined that Bruce was fit and qualified to be a UU minister. But he will not be the Reverend Bruce Taylor, Unitarian Universalist minister, until we, as a congregation, make it so. As those of you who will be with us later today will see, the actual Act of Ordination in the service is not done by an official of the UUA, nor is it done by me as the minister of this congregation. That part of the service is led by the congregation's highest elected lay leader, which in this case is our President Laurie Goodman. We do not do it this way just because it's a neat thing to do. (Well, it is, but that's not the reason.) We do it this way because of the nearly 500 years of church history that we have inherited as heirs of that free-church wing of the Protestant Reformation.
Okay, that's the history part. What I just did was the "eat your vegetables" part of this sermon; stuff that's good for you and good to know. Now we can move on. The overriding paradox about being a called minister in our tradition is that you are both set apart and called into close engagement all at the same time. You are set apart in that you are expected to have a certain level of knowledge - generally typified by a Master of Divinity degree - and demonstrate certain personal and professional qualities that make you fit for the job. You're also set apart in that you're given a title, and an especially unique kind of role in the life of a congregation - a title and a role that the other members do not have.
But in a fully equal measure a minister is called to engagement with, and to a relationship with, that very same congregation. Being set apart is not to be confused with being put on pedestal - something I've never had much of a desire for myself, since I'd probably lose my balance and fall off. Ministry, in our free-church tradition, is primarily about relationship and relationships. Ministry is not something a minister "does to" a congregation - or whoever his or her constituency may be, in the case of a chaplaincy. Ministry is what the minister and the congregation do together, and engage in together, to fulfill a common mission. In our case that common mission is well stated in our Unitarian Universalist Purposes and Principles. Yes, they each - minister and congregants - have their own particularly defined roles in seeing that mission advanced; but it is the relationship between them that makes the fulfillment of the mission possible. If there is no relationship then there is no chance of fulfillment.
I've had the advantage, or opportunity, of stepping outside of a ministerial role, into another realm, that has given me an even better appreciation of what I've just been trying to say. As some of you may know, this fall I've been teaching a course on the Beat Generation writers down at U - Mass., Lowell. The professor who had taught the course for many years suddenly left the university over the summer, with a bunch of students signed up for her course. So the English Department called me in off the bench to teach it. I didn't even know I was on the bench until they asked me; but there it was. Because it's a well defined, time-bound undertaking I agreed to do it. I'll be done before Christmas. I'm enjoying it, and I'll also be glad when I'm done.
There are some similarities between what I'm doing down there on a very short-term basis and what I've been doing here on a much more long-term and ongoing basis. I'm given a title, although I still can't get used to being called Professor - but then I don't trot out the Reverend thing all that often either. I stand in front of a bunch of folks and hold forth on a topic; not entirely unlike what I do here. I get discussions going, same as I do in some the adult education courses I lead here.
But it's all quite different, though. For one thing, down there I get to give tests. Last Monday I gave a mid-term exam. I handed out the questions and the blue books, and then watched a roomful people just write like demons. An idea floated through my head: Maybe I should try this at church sometime. OK, I didn't say it was a good idea. Many of the ideas I get are not especially good ones - this one included. The reason it was not such a good idea, aside from simply being silly, gets back to that relationship piece I was speaking about a few minutes ago.
I may be doing some of the same things (some of the same things I must emphasize) there that I do here; but it's a completely different kind of relationship in each setting. To the extent that I've had the opportunity to get to know them, I like my students. But our agreement with one another is that I will offer them a certain body of knowledge, they will try to learn as much of it as they can in the time we have together, and I'm then supposed to determine how well they've gained that knowledge so they can get a course credit towards a degree. That's the nature of the relationship. It's really a well defined contractual agreement for a certain specific and short span of time.
The relationship between a minister and his/her congregation is something quite different altogether. It's not a contract in the manner that I just described, but rather a covenant which the minister and the congregation enter into, with the understanding that ministry is a shared task and challenge to which, each in his or her own way, is also called. As noted earlier, the professional clergyperson is recognized as being particularly prepared and equipped for ministry in a such way that then allows him or her to call the congregation into a covenantal relationship in which they all take part, and in which each one has a part.
In this light I'd like to offer for you a meditation written by a now retired UU minister named David Rankin. Two of David's ministries were with our UU congregations in San Francisco, California and Atlanta, Georgia. At the end of a meditation manual he wrote many years ago that drew on his experiences in the ministry, he concluded on this note:
"So let me tell you of a lesson I have learned in the ministry: I have learned not to take myself too seriously; or my image too seriously; or myself too seriously. I have learned that the most important item in the religious community is the people of the religious community. And I have learned that the real church can be defined as our most intimate relationships: How we smile and trust each other. How talk and touch each other. How we share and protect each other. How we welcome new friends and forgive old enemies. How we love each other - in all the myriad ways that love can be expressed. That is the church."
What Rev. Rankin has done, in a very personal and poetic way, is show what the covenant that a minister and a congregation, or constituency, share in is really all about. Together they become the church, or religious community, that David Rankin describes. And unless both are participating in that covenant, each with their own roles, then "church," or community, does not happen. That last line of David's where he says the church is "How we love each other in all the myriad ways love can be expressed" certainly came to life in our congregation here over this past week as so many of us came together to honor the life of Marie Keifer and extend our care and concern to her family. Even in the midst of such a deep tragedy as this one, it's a joy for me to see such a shared kind of ministry at work in our congregation.
I'll close by citing the wisdom of yet another, and now departed, UU minister, the Rev. Dana McLean Greeley. Dana was the first President of the UUA when it was formed in 1961; and he served UU congregations in both Concord, New Hampshire and Concord, Massachusetts. Towards the end of his career Dana was asked what it takes to make great ministers. For all that he could have said, he confined his answer to two words: Great congregations. Rev. Greeley wasn't trying to be cute or flip. He certainly knew from a lifetime of experience what an often complex and highly challenging and demanding thing it is to be in the professional ministry. But he was also speaking straight out of the heart of that free-church tradition we briefly explored today: That ministry is not the exclusive domain of the professional clergy. Ministry happens, and achieves whatever greatness it may come to, when that covenant between the minister and the congregation is lived out to its fullest.
This afternoon we as a congregation will both set apart one of our own as a member of the professional clergy, and will do so in a way that also sends him into the closest of relationship with those with whom he will have his ministry in the days to come. And may it also be a time when we each and all re-call ourselves to the liberal ministry in which we each and all have a part.
Stephen Edington
November 8, 2009
